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THE CITY OF THE 
DINNER-PAIL 



THE CITY OF 
THE DINNER-PAIL 



BY 



JONATHAN THAYER LINCOLN 




BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 

1909 



& 






COPYRIGHT, I909, BY JONATHAN THAYER LINCOLN 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 

Published September jqoq 

248321 



P 



TO MY, WIFE 



CONTENTS 

I. The City of the Dinner-Pail I 

II. The Average Citizen and the Labor Prob- 
lem 37 

III. The Man and the Machine 63 

IV. The Time-Clock 95 
V. Trade-Unionism and the Individual Worker 123 

VI. The City of Luxury 157 



*%* These chapters first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly and The 
Outlook, and are here reprinted by permission of the publishers of those 
magazines. 



THE CITY OF THE DINNER-PAIL 



THE CITY OF THE 
DINNER-PAIL 

THERE are cities in America nearly if 
not quite as cosmopolitan in popula- 
tion as Fall River, — the City of the Dinner- 
Pail, I like to call it, — but none in which 
the people of many lands are so intimately 
associated in their daily lives; for the in- 
dustry of this manufacturing community is 
not diversified, there is no opportunity for 
the people of different ancestry to follow 
this or that occupation — they must all 
make cotton cloth or perish ; and so it is that 
the children of Shem, Ham, and Japheth 
live and toil side by side. There are nearly 
one hundred cotton factories in the City of 
the Dinner-Pail, operated by half as many 
corporations. Over three million spindles 
and nearly one hundred thousand looms 
whir and clatter within the granite walls of 



4 THE CITY OF 

the factories, and from daylight until dark 
nearly thirty thousand men and women earn 
their daily bread making cotton cloth. 

Years ago thrifty New England folk built 
mills along the wooded banks of the river 
which furnished power for the machinery, 
and less successful New England folk oper- 
ated the spinning-frames and looms. The 
factories were small, and the city then was 
nothing more than a little manufacturing 
town. As the cotton industry developed, 
the village grew; newer and larger facto- 
ries were built ; English and Irish workers 
came, then French Canadians, and finally 
Portuguese and Italians, Armenians and 
Russians, Polanders, Swedes, Norwegians, 
— the people of every race and language. 
The city now numbers one hundred and 
twenty thousand souls, and is the centre of 
one of the greatest industries in the country. 
There are those who shun the City of the 
Dinner-Pail as if it were the City of Dread- 
ful Night; they gather their skirts about 



THE DINNER-PAIL 5 

them and pass it by, little knowing the vast- 
ness of its human interest, little dreaming 
of the poetry that lies beneath the smoke 
pouring from the factory chimneys. 

Fortune has never been kinder to me 
than on the Sunday morning when I first 
went to service at St. John's Church, in the 
City of the Dinner-Pail. I was a very young 
man then, but one year out of college, and 
just commencing business. At the univer- 
sity I had formed many friendships, and 
had become, by some kindly chance, one 
of a little company of men, slightly older 
than myself, living in Boston — an inter- 
esting literary group; all clever men, and 
some of undoubted though untried genius. 
Since then one of the number has written 
some of the sweetest verses in our language; 
one has made his name familiar to every 
lover of Gothic architecture ; one has writ- 
ten essays which to me at least are as sweet 
and fanciful as those of the gentle Elia; 
and one has painted pictures of rare beauty. 



6 THE CITY OF 

Some have failed, poor chaps, their genius 
turning out to be mere talent ; and one 
whose mind was keenest and whose soul 
was sweetest died before his days of ap- 
prenticeship were done. We used to meet 
in an attic over a paint-shop in the heart 
of the busy city, and discuss with youthful 
enthusiasm the absorbing problems of the 
day. We were all idealists, despising Mr. 
Howells and the writers of his school, 
while our enthusiasm for George Mere- 
dith knew no bounds. We were devout 
followers of the Pre-Raphaelite brother- 
hood, and worshiped the name of William 
Morris; we hated the rush and hurry of a 
commercial age, and railed at "progress" 
when understood to mean electric cars and 
telephones — - in a word, we believed that 
mankind had been brutalized by machin- 
ery, and our mission was to preach the 
gospel of John Ruskin and save America 
from the hands of the Philistines. 

Returning to the City of the Dinner- 



THE DINNER-PAIL 7 

Pail, I found myself in a different atmos- 
phere. Rossetti's name was next to unknown; 
Morris may have been thought of as the in- 
ventor of a comfortable easy-chair, but not 
a single Kelmscott book was owned in the 
city. And as for George Meredith, if one of 
his novels strayed from its shelf in the Pub- 
lic Library, it was because some immature 
young person believed him to be the author 
of "Lucille." The City of the Dinner-Pail 
was then, as it is now, the busiest of New 
England manufacturing towns, a workaday 
city where no vice was so disgraceful as 
idleness; where thousands of men and 
women, yes, and children too, toiled from 
early morning until nightfall in the facto- 
ries, earning their daily bread; where the 
manufacturers themselves worked early and 
late at their desks, and where the talk even 
of the home centred on business. 

One day, as I was busy at my desk over 
a particularly elusive trial balance, a man 
older than myself by about four years en- 



8 THE CITY OF 

tered the office. He was an athletic young 
fellow, whose face indicated a cheerful, 
energetic disposition, and his dress marked 
him as an Episcopal clergyman. His errand 
was quickly explained. He had remem- 
bered me as a member of his college so- 
ciety. His parish was composed of English 
operatives, and, as the winter had been 
unusually severe, many of his parishioners 
were in need. One case particularly inter- 
ested him, and he asked me to help him 
find employment for the man. There was 
a peculiar charm of manner, a mingling of 
sincerity and good humor, of common sense 
and enthusiasm, about the rector of St. 
John's which at once attracted me to him, 
and led me the next Sunday to accept his 
cordial invitation to attend service at his 
church. I found St. John's an unpreten- 
tious Gothic structure of native granite, 
situated a mile or more from the centre of 
the city. There were good lines enough in 
the building to suggest, in a crude way, some 



THE DINNER-PAIL 9 

little English parish church ; and, upon en- 
tering it, the suggestion became complete. 
I felt myself for a moment in the " old 
country/' and, listening to the responses, 
heard the dialect of Lancashire. The illu- 
sion was, however, only for the moment ; 
with the voices speaking the dialect of a 
country beyond sea were mingled the nasal 
tones of New England; for in St. John's 
parish Yankee sons are begotten of English 
fathers. The Protestant Episcopal Church 
is the one heirloom left to us by England, 
when she officially departed from our shores, 
which time has altered least. To thousands 
in our generation it proclaims the message 
that the splendid history of England is our 
history too — that all her glorious tradi- 
tions are ours by right of inheritance ; and 
as I sat in St. John's Church that Sunday 
morning listening to the responses in which 
were mingled the dialects of Lancashire 
and New England, I was alive, as never be- 
fore, to the grandeur of this heritage. And 



io THE CITY OF 

what hearty responses these were! Listening, 
I understood that the people of St. John's 
worshiped God with whole hearts. It was 
hard to realize that these people, devout, 
single-hearted, enthusiastic in their quest 
for truth, were the same men and women 
who, working at the spinning-frame and 
loom, had so often seemed to be merely 
the vital part of the machinery. That jno- 
ment I determined to know them better, 
and I here record with love and gratitude 
that many of the happiest hours of my life 
have been spent in their companionship. 
When I left St. John's that Sunday morn- 
ing, I realized that the life about me was 
not the dismal, sordid thing that fancy had 
painted it, but, instead, possessed an interest 
passing the imagination ; and with an un- 
wonted enthusiasm I sought to find my own 
place in it. 

At half-past five each morning in the 
City of the Dinner-Pail the factory bells 
ring out in merry chorus; only the older 



THE DINNER-PAIL n 

factories keep up the custom, but they are 
so numerous that the bells are heard from 
one end of the city to the other. On many 
a dark winter morning the sound of the bells 
has awakened me to reflect for a moment on 
the lot of those who "get up by night and 
dress by yellow candle-light " ; and I have 
returned to my dreams while already the 
streets were beginning to be thronged with 
the army of the dinner-pail. And what a 
motley army it is which, in the early morn- 
ing, hurries through the streets to the day's 
work in the many factories ! It is composed 
of men and women of every race and lan- 
guage — the greatest numbers, however, 
being of French, Irish, and English parent- 
age. 

The French Canadian population, num- 
bering about thirty-five thousand, is cen- 
tralized in the eastern part of the city. 
Walking the streets, one hears French 
spoken quite as often as English; boarding- 
houses bear the sign of " Maison de Pen- 



12 THE CITY OF 

sion," while other signs over the shop-doors 
set forth in French the dealer's wares. High 
on a hill overlooking the beautiful lakes 
which skirt the city to the eastward stands 
Notre Dame College, in which are en- 
rolled over twelve hundred students, and 
near the college buildings towers the great 
church of Notre Dame. In the adjoining 
streets are the parochial residence, the con- 
vent, and the schools. Not far away is the 
office of "L/Independant," a daily paper 
of no mean circulation, printed in French. 
In its columns may be found recorded the 
meetings of such societies as the Ligue des 
Patriotes, the Garde Napoleon, the Societe 
de St. Jean Baptiste, and such clubs as the 
LaurierandLaBoucane, the Cercle Mont- 
calm, and a score of others. 

As one walks the streets of the French 
quarter it is hard to believe one's self in a 
New England city. If one were to enter 
the houses, this belief would be even more 
difficult ; here he would find customs very 



THE DINNER-PAIL 13 

foreign to the soil in which they flourish ; 
he would hear the affairs of the home dis- 
cussed in a foreign tongue; he would find 
no trace of the Puritan traditions deep- 
rooted in another section of the city among 
the few thousand of New England descent 
who dwell there, but, instead, the tradi- 
tions of a Latin race. While he would find 
so much that was foreign in suggestion, he 
would, however, discover, if he looked be- 
neath the surface, a deep-rooted American- 
ism ; for these people are loyal citizens of the 
United States. The French voters who go 
to the polls take a keen interest in politics; 
they influence new immigrants to become 
naturalized, and, when their papers are 
received, to exercise the right of suffrage. 
Here, as in their northern homes, the 
French Canadians run slight risk of ex- 
tinction through race suicide, for their fam- 
ilies are large. I have heard of instances 
where the children of the same parents 
numbered more than twenty, and families 



14 THE CITY OF 

of twelve and fourteen occasion no com- 
ment among them. Large families beget 
either shiftlessness or thrift, and in the pre- 
sent instance it is the latter which obtains, 
for thrift is the predominant characteristic 
in the homes of the French quarter. The 
French Canadian loves the dollar ; he dreads 
nothing more than a strike, because a strike 
enforces idleness, and idleness entails loss 
of wages. There are no French Canadian 
labor leaders. 

The Irishman who makes his home in 
the city is the same Irishman who makes 
his home everywhere in the land — as he 
himself might state it. There are twenty- 
five thousand Irish- Americans in the City 
of the Dinner-Pail; the ancestors of some 
came before the first factory was built ; and 
many an Irish family can claim to be among 
the oldest in the community. From these 
families come many of the foremost citi- 
zens, conspicuous in every profession as 
well as in every trade and craft. Most of 



THE DINNER-PAIL 15 

the twenty-five thousand, however, came 
in recent years : some came yesterday, fresh 
from the old sod, as green as their emer- 
ald isle, clad in homespun, and speaking 
an unintelligible dialect ; but before a de- 
cade has passed, all will have become en- 
thusiastic citizens of the great Republic. 

The English operatives, some of whom 
we have seen at their devotions in St. John's 
Church, bring with them the customs and 
traditions of the old country. They give 
tea-parties at which the guests sing unend- 
ing ballads to monotonous music; Shrove 
Tuesday brings the inevitable pancake, 
Christmas its plum pudding and the Yule 
log. Perhaps at Christmas-time transplanted 
traditions are most in evidence, for at this 
season of the year the hearts of men go out 
to all mankind, and in the cosmopolitan 
community each speaks his message in his 
own tongue, and, as in the day of Pente- 
cost, each hears the message of the others 
in his own language. The English trim 



1 6 THE CITY OF 

their churches with their own hands — it 
is no meaningless ceremony with them; 
they gather the greens and wreathe the 
holly to welcome the coming of the Christ 
Child. On Christmas Eve the candles are 
lighted in many homes, and shine a wel- 
come through the windows to the wayfarer ; 
and, best of all, after the midnight service 
in the church, the waits go about the sleep- 
ing city — no whir of spindles or clatter of 
loom is then heard — singing carols. The 
voices of the singers ring out on the winter 
air: — 

It came upon the midnight clear, 

That glorious song of old, 
From angels bending near the earth 

To touch their harps of gold: 
Peace on the earth, good will to men 

From Heaven's all-gracious King. 
The world in solemn stillness lay 

To hear the angels sing. 

And those who sing this carol are the same 
men and women who throughout the year 



THE DINNER-PAIL 17 

stand beside the spinning-frame and loom 
in the noisy factories. 

A description even of the Christmas cus- 
toms of the folk of the many nations who 
work side by side in the mills would fill 
many pages; and a volume which should 
include also a description of the Old World 
traditions which survive in the family life 
would be of vital interest to the student of 
sociology ; for the City of the Dinner-Pail 
strikingly illustrates the wonderful process 
of assimilation which is going on through- 
out our country. Each year immigrants 
from every nation under heaven come to our 
shores, and are transformed into loyal citi- 
zens. It is, happily, not true that the tradi- 
tions of the old home vanish in a moment 
as by a miracle ; they remain, slightly modi- 
fied perhaps, for generations ; but they sur- 
vive in the home, not in the civic life; and 
the survival of these customs lends a peculiar 
charm to the study of life among the toilers. 

Some one has facetiously said that 



1 8 THE CITY OF 

"American" was spoken at the building 
of the tower of Babel. Underlying this say- 
ing is a truth which one can easily under- 
stand by walking, some Saturday evening, 
through the main street of the City of the 
Dinner-Pail. Years ago, when the great 
city was an insignificant factory town, and 
all the spindles in operation would not equip 
the smallest of its many mills to-day; when 
these spindles were tended by the sons and 
daughters of farmer-folk, whose grandchil- 
dren now look pityingly at the operatives 
returning from the day's work, dinner-pail 
in hand; when the sight of any of the for- 
eigners who crowd the streets to-day (the 
Italian woman, her head surmounted by a 
huge bundle tied up in a bright shawl ; the 
pretty French girl, dressed stylishly, if 
cheaply ; the Portuguese laborer smoking 
his cigarette; the long-bearded rabbi; the 
Dominican monk in the garb of his order) 
would have created a stir of excitement to 
be talked of for days in the community, — 



THE DINNER-PAIL 19 

years ago it was the custom of the village 
folk, after their Saturday supper of baked 
beans and cold corned beef, to go "down 
street," as the saying was. The shops were 
open, and thither went the village folk to 
make the week's purchases, pay the past 
week's bills, and, if the night were pleasant, 
leisurely to walk up and down the street. 
Besides this the village offered meagre pas- 
time for its people. Nor was there great 
need for amusement, save on Saturday 
nights ; for work began at sunrise and ended 
at sunset, and it was only on the evening 
before the Sabbath that the good people of 
the town were inclined to sit up o* nights. 
When the mills multiplied and the for- 
eigners came, they, too, took up the custom 
of going " down street, 5 ' and this custom has 
survived until to-day. On other evenings 
Main Street presents no unusual appearance, 
but on Saturday night the sidewalks for a 
distance of half a mile north and south of 
City Hall — the limits of the village street 



20 THE CITY OF 

as it was in the old days — are crowded with 
good-natured, laughing men and women. 
Nowhere in the world, not even on Broad- 
way or Piccadilly, could we find a crowd 
more dense. It is interesting to note that 
this unusually crowded condition is limited 
to a single mile of sidewalk in the very 
centre of the city; that the crowding begins 
at about seven in the evening and ceases 
at nine, as abruptly as it begins; that the 
greatest numbers promenade on one side of 
the street, which must have been the "pro- 
per side " in the old days; and that the vast 
throng congested within these narrow lim- 
its seems bent on no business. The shops 
are open and are well patronized, but 
the number of shoppers is insignificant 
compared with the thousands who walk 
aimlessly along, an irresistible current of 
humanity. 

What multitudes of events in every land 
under heaven have contributed to gather 
here these men and women of so diverse 



THE DINNER-PAIL 21 

heritage ! Here are united the strength and 
vigor of the North, the gentle, careless spirit 
of the South ; here East meets West, and all 
are welded in a mighty whole. What mean- 
ing has their presence here to us who seek 
to understand the "Social Question," who 
seek to solve the "Labor Problem"? 

The first fact — so evident that a specific 
statement of it seems unnecessary — is this : 
every man and woman making up this 
throng is a human being, an individual, 
distinct and different from everv other 
individual that God has created. Evident 
as is the fact, there is a tendency in our 
time to neglect its meaning. Our very 
phraseology when we refer to these work- 
ing men and women indicates the trend ; we 
speak of the labor element, the labor vote, 
the demands of labor, when we mean the 
workers: the individuals who toil in the 
factories, the votes of these individual 
workers, and the demands for better con- 
ditions of life which these individuals, act- 



22 THE CITY OF 

ing with a common impulse, make upon 
their employers. In the old days "help" 
was the word used to designate the work- 
ers, and this difference in language has a 
deeper significance than at first appears. It 
means that men and women who in the 
early days of the factory system helped their 
employers — that is, were associated with 
them in the manufacture of cotton cloth 
— now sell their labor as they might sell 
coal and cotton were they dealers in these 
commodities, and that somehow, in the 
complicated development of the factory 
system, the individuality of these workers 
has been so merged with the great machine 
of which they are the parts, that in our 
common speech we fail to make the proper 
distinction between labor and the laborer, 
between the commodity and the man who 
sells the commodity. 

If we were to follow these men and wo- 
men to the thousand homes to which they 
will return, we should find these homes 



THE DINNER-PAIL 23 

far more attractive than the average citizen 
is prone to think. We should also come to 
know the workers as individuals, and in our 
minds separate the commodity from the 
man who sells the commodity; and, be- 
coming acquainted with these persons in 
their homes, we should learn to use dis- 
crimination in accepting as truth much that 
is written about them in sensational mag- 
azine articles, much that is printed in the 
authoritative-looking volumes of the doc- 
tors of philosophy. 

In the last generation the factory day 
began at dawn and ended at nightfall. Then, 
as now, some workers were contented and 
some rebellious ; by turns the ten-hour and 
the eight-hour day were heralded as the 
dawn of the workingman's hope; but still 
some are satisfied and some discontented. 
In our vain efforts to solve the labor prob- 
lem we rush from one ineffectual remedy 
to another, because we are unable to view 
the problem in its true perspective. If we 



24 THE CITY OF 

could follow the men and women who 
crowd the main street of the City of the 
Dinner- Pail each Saturday evening, if we 
could go to their homes, and become ac- 
quainted with the worker as an individual, 
many errors that now distort our vision 
would be corrected. 

At half-past five each morning in the 
City of the Dinner-Pail the factory bells 
ring out in merry chorus, and half an hour 
later the streets are thronged with the army 
of the dinner-pail, hurrying to the day's 
work in the factories. Twenty-seven thou- 
sand men and women make up this host of 
labor — men and women, that is the fact to 
be remembered. Once in the factory, they 
will become the vital part of the great 
machine which annually turns out so many 
million yards of cotton cloth ; but now, as 
they hurry to the day's work, we recog- 
nize in each an individual human soul, 
separate and distinct from every other. 
Fearful injustice has been done these men 



THE DINNER-PAIL 25 

and women by persons with the best in- 
tentions — persons who write books about 
them, slandering their manhood and their 
womanhood. This army lives on frugal 
rations, fights hard, sleeps well, every year 
advances, never retreats. The social unrest 
that so many talk about and fear is a healthy 
unrest — it is the sign of social progress. 

Less than a century ago, when the fac- 
tory bells rang out upon the morning 
air, what manner of men and women 
responded to the call ? New England folk, 
men and women, boys and girls from the 
neighboring farms. To-day their children 
own these factories, and the Yankee oper- 
ative has all but disappeared. The English 
followed, then the French, not to starve 
and fail, but to follow the law of human 
progress. In every generation of these fac- 
tory-folk men and women appear in whom 
is embodied the aspiration of the class, the 
aspiration which underlies the social un- 
rest. The immediate cause of that unrest 



26 THE CITY OF 

may be some condition incident to the 
factory system, but these immediate causes 
are not primal causes; the fundamental 
cause is inherent in that impulse of the 
race that compels it to rise from worse to 
better, from better to best. 

The case of an elderly slasher-tender 
with whom I am acquainted is an instance 
of this impulse working in the individual. 
This man was a Lancashire operative of 
the class that supplanted the Yankee worker 
when, in the process of social evolution, 
the New Englander ceased to tend the ma- 
chinery in the factories. He and his wife 
took equal chances with the other opera- 
tives in the mills, they worked under the 
same conditions, with equal opportunities, 
yet they were able to send their children 
to high school and normal school, and thus 
the latter became teachers instead of weav- 
ers ; their grandchildren will go to college, 
and, alas ! will forget the link that unites 
them with the toilers. The case of the 



THE DINNER-PAIL 27 

slasher-tender is not peculiar; there are 
many hundred such cases in the City of 
the Dinner-Pail. He is not some meteor- 
like exception of a man who rises from 
rail-splitter to President and is used by the 
preacher as an example with which to 
exhort listless boys ; he is typical of a phase 
of the industrial question that the reform- 
ers have overlooked. 

We see evidences of the working of the 
law of human progress in classes of toilers, 
here in the City of the Dinner-Pail, as 
well as in individuals. Matthew Arnold 
suggested culture as the antidote for an- 
archy. Mr. Frederic Harrison and the re- 
formers laughed at him. " Do something/' 
they cried; "do something; no good can 
come of dreaming ; culture cannot put food 
into infants' mouths." Reformers then, as 
now, were in a hurry. But the poet was 
wiser than the reformers knew. Here, in 
the City of the Dinner-Pail, the English 
replaced the Yankee workers, and French 



28 THE CITY OF 

Canadians are replacing the English. The 
Yankees did not starve, and the English 
are not starving. The Yankees became 
manufacturers, they became clerks and mer- 
chants and doctors and lawyers and teach- 
ers; and the English are following in the 
footsteps of the Yankee. Every individual 
did not rise; thousands failed hopelessly, 
— that is the law, — individuals perished, 
but the type survived, and in surviving ad- 
vanced. The English replaced the Yankee, 
and the French are replacing the English, 
and in the life of the French-Canadian 
operative I see an evidence of the law of 
progress working in a way that suggests 
Matthew Arnold's remedy. 

I have already referred to the great church 
of Notre Dame, which, surrounded by the 
college building, the convent, and the 
schools, stands high on the hill overlook- 
ing the city. You may say that that minster, 
the spires of which may be seen for miles 
about, stands for the power of the Roman 



THE DINNER-PAIL 29 

Church, and so it does. But it stands for 
a power mightier still than the ecclesias- 
tical dominion of the Bishop of Rome; it 
stands for the aspiration of the race ; and, 
in a particular sense, it stands for the law 
of human progress at work among the 
French- Canadian operatives. Who built 
that great church high on the hill over- 
looking the city ? It was built by French- 
Canadian operatives, — thousands of them, 
— each giving his mite from the meagre 
wages earned day in and day out, standing 
beside the spinning-frame and loom. Many 
hundred thousand dollars in wages is the 
measure of their sacrifice. The church is 
built in mighty proportions; the aspira- 
tion which built it is a mighty aspiration. 
But if you come to study the building 
with the eye of an architect, forgetting its 
real meaning, you will see recorded in its 
stones the fact that the aspiration, mighty 
though it be, is at the same time crude and 
uneducated. Had Ruskin seen that build- 



3 o THE CITY OF 

ing, he would have had another argument 
to show the brutalizing effect of machin- 
ery. The church is neither classical, nor 
Gothic, nor Byzantine, nor Egyptian, but 
a very hodgepodge of every order of archi- 
tecture in the history of that useful art. 
But who was the architect? From what 
class did he spring? From the same class 
to which belong the men and women who 
built the church by their sacrifice. And 
when the building in all its rawness, but 
in all its vast proportions too, was com- 
pleted, these same operatives gave again, 
each his mite, and an Italian painter of 
great talent — some of us believe great gen- 
ius — came to the City of the Dinner-Pail 
and gave four years of his life to decorat- 
ing the w^alls of the church. He painted 
a series of pictures illustrating the human 
life of Christ, and in a mighty canvas de- 
picted the Last Judgment in such a manner 
as to attract to Notre Dame students of 
art, who, as they study the picture, forget 



THE DINNER-PAIL 31 

the crude walls that frame it, forget the 
noisy city with its whir of spindles and 
clatter of shuttles, finding here in such an 
unexpected corner of the world a work of 
art which raises their souls to the height 
of vision. In the great church of Notre 
Dame I see an evidence of the law of pro- 
gress operating in a class of working peo- 
ple seeking its end through culture. That 
the people themselves are unconscious of 
the law and of the means by which it op- 
erates does not lessen the force of the law 
nor deny the means. 

We turn from the individual and the 
class to the whole community, and here in 
no less striking manner we see evidences of 
the law of progress seeking its end through 
culture. Given a city of one hundred and 
twenty thousand persons, seven-eighths of 
them of the operative class, and you would 
little expect to find that in all those things 
that make for the higher life of the com- 
munity this city should have kept pace, nay, 



32 THE CITY OF 

even have outstripped, its progress in mate- 
rial things. Yet such is the case. The first 
free public library in the world was estab- 
lished in Boston, and nine years later the 
City of the Dinner-Pail followed the ex- 
ample of the Modern Athens. We might 
look for the first free public library in a 
great intellectual centre, but we should 
hardly expect to find the second in a 
workaday community. The impulse that 
prompted the establishment of the library 
in Boston came, without doubt, from those 
who knew the blessings of the intellectual 
life and desired to dedicate a great public 
institution to the advancement of learning. 
The impulse which led to the establishment 
of a similar institution in the City of the 
Dinner-Pail found its source, I believe, in 
an aspiration that looked beyond the fac- 
tory walls — the fruit of the law of human 
progress at work among the toilers. 

More natural than the establishment of 
a public library, perhaps, was the introduc- 



THE DINNER-PAIL 33 

tion of free text-books in the public schools 
years before free text-books were required 
by state law. In a community of wage- 
earners, where even a small sum spent 
for books would be a burden to the indi- 
vidual, it was natural that the municipality 
should be called upon to bear the burden; 
yet at the same time the fact that the com- 
munity anticipated the law is an evidence 
of its faith in the value of education, its 
effort to combat anarchy with culture. 
More natural still, but nevertheless an evi- 
dence of the aspiration of its citizens, is the 
fact that before the law of the state required 
manual training to be taught in the high 
schools of all cities of twenty-live thousand 
inhabitants and over, such a course was 
made a part of the school curriculum in the 
City of the Dinner-Pail, while the same 
community was among the first to establish 
a free kindergarten and a public training- 
school for teachers. 

It may be said that all these evidences 



34 THE CITY OF 

of a community alive to the blessings of 
education were due, in the first place, to 
the sagacity of far-seeing individuals, public 
servants, themselves educated men and 
actuated by philanthropic zeal; and in a 
measure this is so ; but that such individuals 
should be developed in this workaday city, 
in the very heart of Philistia, and daily 
touching elbows with the populace, is the 
best evidence of that aspiration to which I 
refer ; and if this fact were not enough to 
prove the truth of the statement, then the 
enthusiasm with which the toilers take ad- 
vantage of these many opportunities opened 
to them could be cited as conclusive evi- 
dence. Had there been no free normal 
school, the slasher-tender's daughters would 
not have become teachers ; but it was not the 
training-school that enabled them to live 
their lives in the schoolroom instead of the 
factory, it was the law of progress domi- 
nating the mother's mind, — that mother 
who for so many years tended eight looms 



THE DINNER-PAIL 35 

in the noisy weave-room, — the unconquer- 
able desire in the mother's heart to give her 
children better things than she had known. 
And again, turning from the individual to 
the working people as a whole, we find the 
final evidence. It is no small thing for three 
thousand operatives, after spending ten and 
one-half hours at work in the factories, to 
attend school from seven o'clock until nine 
in the evening. Yet so they do, not only in 
the textile school, seeking to increase their 
efficiency as operatives; not only in the 
primary and intermediate schools, seek- 
ing to fulfill the educational requirements 
of the state law ; but in the evening high 
school, seeking that culture which is the 
fulfillment of the law of progress. 

In the introduction to his "History of 
English Literature" Taine says: "Neither 
mythology nor language exist in them- 
selves ; but only men who arrange words and 
imagery according to the necessities of their 
organs and the original bent of their intel- 



36 THE DINNER-PAIL 

lects. A dogma is nothing in itself. Look 
at the people who have made it ; nothing 
exists except through some individual man; 
it is this individual with whom we must be- 
come acquainted." In just this way, there 
is no labor problem separate from the men 
and women who create it. To understand 
the problem we must know the individuals, 
and know them as they really are — the 
worker at the loom and in his home, the 
employer at his desk and in the world of 
men. 



II 



THE AVERAGE CITIZEN AND 
THE LABOR PROBLEM 



THE AVERAGE CITIZEN 

AND THE LABOR 

PROBLEM 

THE library shelves groan with the 
weight of books catalogued under the 
head of "Sociology." Thousands of these 
volumes deal with what is loosely called 
"The Social Question," or, what amounts 
to the same thing, " The Labor Problem." 
Some of the authors are scholars who have 
thought deeply along economic lines; some 
are sensational writers who cry that the rich 
are growing richer and the poor are grow- 
ing poorer, and nothing but a revolution 
can restore the balance. There are also 
apologists for the present regime, who tell 
us that, all things considered, the worker 
has no reason to be discontented; yet the 
worker is discontented, and the fact must 
be explained. There is a trend toward 



40 THE AVERAGE CITIZEN 

Socialism in these days, and programmes for 
municipal ownership are in the air: some 
reformers would enact laws to forbid, or at 
least to limit, the inheritance of great for- 
tunes ; some would level the conditions of 
rich and poor by a system of graduated tax- 
ation. A thousand projects are being dis- 
cussed, any one of which we may be called 
upon to sanction at the polls, yet the aver- 
age citizen has but the haziest notion of 
the social question and the conditions which 
create it. The average citizen has not read 
the books upon the library shelves — and 
with reason, as it seems to him. The pon- 
derous tomes of the doctors of philosophy 
present a forbidding aspect; he has been 
told that the volumes written by young 
ladies engaged in settlement work are not 
always trustworthy; and he shuns the 
writing of the reformers in the belief that 
all such are anarchistic. He has a notion 
that great fortunes must be tainted; he 
regrets that thousands of his fellow men go 



AND THE LABOR PROBLEM 41 

to bed hungry ; and when strikes and lock- 
outs send up the market price of beef and 
coal, he believes there is a labor problem. 
Then he forms his opinion of it from either 
the yellow or the subsidized press. Poor, 
perplexed average citizen, if he would come 
to the City of the Dinner-Pail, walk its 
streets and enter its factories, he would find 
the problem stated and discover some prac- 
tical suggestions toward a solution. 

The writer of this essay is not an econo- 
mist — he is not even a sociologist; he has, 
however, lived all his days in a manufac- 
turing community; he has known and 
admired many persons of great wealth, and 
he has known and admired many persons 
who toil from daylight to dark, earning 
their daily bread in the factories; and he 
hopes that certain facts that he has learned 
from these persons maybe of some benefit 
to the average citizen in his quest for truth. 

Some years ago a reputable review pub- 
lished a sensational article concerning the 



42 THE AVERAGE CITIZEN 

City of the Dinner-Pail, and the Board of 
Trade selected a writer to reply to certain 
statements made in this article which did 
not seem to square with the truth. It was 
my good fortune to accompany the coun- 
sel for the defendant in his tour about the 
city investigating the charges. The sensa- 
tional writer had described the tenements 
in which the operatives lived, and selected 
for particular criticism a group of houses 
owned by a prosperous corporation. Such a 
picture of squalor has seldom been painted 
— evidently the gentleman had never be- 
fore seen a house without a bath on every 
floor. These houses were built about a quad- 
rangle which served as a common back 
yard, and while this back yard might not be 
all that Mr. J. Horace McFarland might 
desire so far as grass and trees are concerned, 
it was a very large breathing-space, and 
gave each tenant a right to more out-of- 
doors than one can hire for several thou- 
sand dollars on Fifth Avenue. In the centre 



AND THE LABOR PROBLEM 43 

of the quadrangle were a number of out- 
houses which caused this diligent student of 
sociology a bad quarter of an hour, and he 
wrote a long paragraph about the fearful 
sanitary conditions of the court, where 
outhouses were placed close to the bedroom 
windows. He failed, however, to state the 
fact that, while the small wooden buildings 
were originally intended for sanitary pur- 
poses, they were used at the time he wrote 
as woodsheds, the tenements having been 
fitted with modern plumbing many years 
before. He summed up his case against the 
quadrangle in these words : " In the centre 
of all this filth stands a pump/' Not only 
did the noxious odors invite diphtheria and 
Heaven knows what other fearsome dis- 
eases, but the tenants drank infected water 
from a well situated in the courtyard! As 
a fact, there was a pump in the yard, but the 
pump was without a handle, for the tenants 
drank the same water with which the city 
provided their landlord's table. 



44 THE AVERAGE CITIZEN 

This well illustrates the sensational writ- 
er's method in dealing with the problem. 
Every fact stated was true — there were 
outhouses in the quadrangle, and near by 
there was a pump ; but while the facts were 
true, the writer's conclusions were false, be- 
cause, while he told nothing but the truth, 
he failed to tell the whole truth. 

My friend's reply was quiet in tone and 
more scholarly in treatment than the paper 
it contradicted ; but he, like the other au- 
thor, was a partisan — one held a brief for 
the workingman, the other argued his case 
for the manufacturer. The counsel for the 
defendant called attention to the large 
deposits standing to the credit of working- 
men in the savings banks : a majority of the 
depositors in several institutions for savings 
were factory operatives, and this he cited 
as evidence that the operatives were well 
paid and thrifty. While I believe the work- 
ers in the City of the Dinner- Pail are thrifty 
and well paid, I want to suggest the danger 



AND THE LABOR PROBLEM 45 

of drawing such a general conclusion from 
the evidence. Large bank deposits standing 
in the names of factory operatives clearly 
indicate that a healthy financial condition 
exists among the workers, but do not prove 
that the average worker earns more than he 
spends. The fact that many operatives own 
bank-books merely shows that under exist- 
ing conditions the thrifty worker may save 
money. To ascertain the exact meaning of 
the deposits argument it would be neces- 
sary to know the aggregate of the deposits 
and the number of depositors, and to classify 
the workers as to the amount of wages they 
actually earn ; this in itself would require 
the attention of one student for a consid- 
erable time. It is as unfair to take the thrifty, 
self-denying workingman as the type as it 
is to set up the hungry, depraved wretch as 
the inevitable result of the factory system ; 
for the workingman is, after all, merely a 
human being, an individual distinct and dif- 
ferent from every other, and whether he 



46 THE AVERAGE CITIZEN 

lives in squalor or in comfort depends, in a 
larger measure than we are wont to think, 
upon himself; and his well-being on his 
obedience to greater laws than legislatures 
can enact. 

At the railway station one morning I 
met an army of immigrants just arrived: 
one hundred and sixty Western Islanders, 
men, women, and children seeking a new 
home on this continent. Had I journeyed 
to the Azores, outside the principal ports I 
should have had difficulty in finding so great 
a crowd of natives ; yet here, within a mile 
of my own hearthstone, I was to all pur- 
poses in Fayal. It was by no means the 
ragged mob the sensational writer would 
have painted it, but a laughing, interested 
crowd of men and women getting theirfirst 
impressions of a strange country. It was a 
healthy unrest which sent them wayfaring 
— the hope to better their condition; 
friends had come before them and sent back 
word that America was indeed the land of 



AND THE LABOR PROBLEM 47 

promise; following their example, these 
men and women had become wayfarers, 
and here they were, expectant of a new 
hope. Some will achieve that hope and 
some will fail, but the achievement or the 
failure will rest with the individual. 

The sensational writer would view this 
company with dismay — another regiment 
to be mowed down by the machine guns 
of capital; the apologist would point to their 
happy, interested faces and tell you the joy 
of their quest, and how much better it is 
to run eight looms all day and have the 
evenings to one's self than to till the bar- 
ren soil of an island in the sea ; and each 
writer would fall wide of the mark. Some 
among this company will be successful, 
some will fail, and so they would had they 
remained at home; some have increased 
their chance of happiness in the broader 
life of the New World, the others have in- 
creased the penalty of failure; but the suc- 
cess or failure, the happiness or discontent, 



48 THE AVERAGE CITIZEN 

will rest with the individual, and cannot be 
created by act of legislature. 

A lad of seventeen, who for several years 
had worked at doffing in a cotton-mill, 
obtained a position as office-boy in another 
manufacturing concern. He was a keen, 
energetic young fellow, and his employer, 
ever in search of such boys to strengthen 
his organization when they should become 
men, took an unusual interest in the new- 
comer. One morning he noticed the boy 
engaged in footing up the columns of an 
old pay-sheet. The task seemed a useless 
one, and the employer asked the boy why 
he did it. The boy replied that, having no 
other work, he had asked the bookkeeper 
for the sheet that he might verify it, for 
the benefit of the practice. His employer, 
pleased with the reply, explained to him 
how eagerly men in business sought for 
boys of serious purpose, and commended 
the lad for his diligence. The boy, hesitat- 
ing at first, but encouraged by his employ- 



AND THE LABOR PROBLEM 49 

er's interest, said, "I have wanted to tell 
you, sir, for a long time, how my ideas about 
rich men have changed since I left the mill. 
The men I worked with there were Social- 
ists, and they said rich men had no hearts. 
I had never known a rich man, and when I 
came here I was afraid every time I made a 
mistake that I should get a beating. The 
first time I was sent to your private office 
you spoke kindly to me, and I went home 
that night and told my mother that rich 
men were sometimes just as kind as the 
poor." 

This is a true story, and what a fearful con- 
dition it illustrates — a working boy aston- 
ished that his employer could be kind! The 
solution of the labor problem lies in simpler 
means than we imagine ; we fret and fume 
about this and that enactment of law, while 
the real solution lies beyond the province 
of legislatures, but within the scope of each 
man's life — a fuller understanding of the 
lives of those we meet and talk with and 



50 THE AVERAGE CITIZEN 

pass by each day. There exists a deplorable 
ignorance on the part of the smug and com- 
fortable concerning the lives of those who 
toil, and a similar ignorance obtains among 
the workers concerning those who employ 
them. 

When I was a boy playing about my 
father's machine-shop, I watched a man 
boring castings, and to-day I saw the same 
man working on the same machine, and 
still boring holes. What a text this might 
give the pessimist for his sermon : how he 
would picture the despair of this man's life, 
and what an arraignment he would make of 
the factory system ! Yet if he knew the man 
as I have come to know him, he would find 
him to be just another mortal on his certain 
journey from the cradle to the grave. He 
is a great gentleman in his own set, this 
borer of holes, and in the past quarter of a 
century has saved from his wages what his 
shopmates deem quite a fortune. He goes 
to church every Sunday with his daughter, 



AND THE LABOR PROBLEM 51 

a college girl, in whose education he takes 
a pardonable pride. He is a philosopher 
withal; he has looked out upon the world, 
and it has meant something to him. He 
owns the house in which he lives, and be- 
lieves that there should be a property quali- 
fication for voters. He tells me that it is 
a mistake for a man never to take a vaca- 
tion, and every year he goes to New York 
for a week, to correct his perspective. Some- 
times in the summer he goes to Newport 
for a day, but he does not approve of the 
summer capital — the residents live to no 
purpose, they seem bent on killing time. 
Hours to him are synonymous with dollars, 
and dollars with the education of children. 
This workingman, the facts seem to prove, 
is not the miserable creature the disciples 
of Mr. Ruskin would have us believe ; and, 
although his horizon is limited, he has 
advanced a step beyond the office-boy — he 
knows that his employer may be kind, but 
he has not learned that the man who gives 



52 THE AVERAGE CITIZEN 

ten thousand dollars to a hospital, and the 
moment the check is written forgets it, is 
still capable of self-sacrifice. 

Some fifteen years ago "The Coffee 
Tavern' ' was one of the most interesting 
institutions in the City of the Dinner-Pail. 
Primarily the purpose of the Tavern was 
to provide a temperance restaurant for 
workingmen, and connected with it were 
rooms for reading and recreation. Soon, 
however, there came a demand for some- 
thing more than mere entertainment. Over 
the games of pool and checkers discussions 
arose concerning labor and capital, and the 
men asked for a class in political economy. 
Thus an educational work was begun 
which resulted in a few workingmen and 
a few employers of labor becoming better 
acquainted. 

The directors of the Tavern, among 
whom were several large employers of 
labor, met once a week about the round 
table which was the one conspicuous orna- 



AND THE LABOR PROBLEM 53 

ment of the directors' room, the regular 
dinner was served, and the affairs of the in- 
stitution were discussed. Incidentally other 
matters were touched upon, and time out 
of number the great problem of labor and 
capital was talked over, from two very dif- 
ferent points of view, by the workingmen 
in the main dining-room and the directors 
seated about the round table. After dinner 
employer and employee smoked their pipes 
and played games together, and each re- 
turned to the factory with a higher regard 
for the opinions of the other. 

There was a debating club which met at 
the Tavern on Sunday afternoons, at the 
meetings of which some speaker, in an 
address limited to thirty minutes, presented 
the subject, after which a ruler was passed 
from hand to hand, the possessor of the 
talisman being allowed five minutes in 
which to add to the weight of the speaker's 
argument or to refute his thesis. The men 
who debated were workingmen, — unedu- 



54 THE AVERAGE CITIZEN 

cated, brutalized, as some writers would 
have us believe ; yet I have often heard 
at the Tavern, on Sunday afternoon, de- 
bates which would have done credit to 
many a state senate. 

In looking over a file filled with forgot- 
ten notes concerning the labor problem, I 
chanced upon a manuscript written several 
years ago by one Thomas Evans, who signed 
himself " Justice of the Peace and Old 
Labor Agitator." It brought to mind the 
figure of an aged Englishman, — a native 
of Lancashire, — rough, unkempt, forceful, 
but one whose eyes looked out with kind- 
ness on the world in which he lived. All 
about him he saw conditions crying for 
reform ; he knew the times were out of 
joint, and believed with his whole heart 
that he had been born to set them right. 
Thomas Evans was a remarkable man; 
lacking culture, he had the mind of a 
scholar ; in the manuscript he failed to dot 
his /'s and cross his /'s, but his reason- 



AND THE LABOR PROBLEM 55 

ing was clear and his argument masterful. 
When I first knew him as a Coffee Tavern 
debater, he was an old man and down on 
his luck, as the saying is, despised by the 
manufacturers for being a labor agitator, 
hated by the workingmen for conceding 
the fact that sometimes the capitalist is 
not in error. He was very poor in worldly 
goods, but rich in his love for men. Later, 
some well-meaning gentlemen made it 
possible for him to spend his last days in 
a home for aged people, but his stay there 
was brief: he longed for the activities of a 
busy world; he preferred poverty with 
doing to comfort with inaction ; and after 
a few weeks he left the Home and returned 
to his attic and the crust of bread. En- 
feebled by age, he could no longer win even 
a meagre living; he spent a few weeks in 
the poorhouse, but then his indomitable 
will again sent him forth into the world of 
men, where for a few days he fought his 
last brave battle. One afternoon his totter- 



56 THE AVERAGE CITIZEN 

ing form appeared in the public square; a 
group of idlers gathered about him, and the 
old agitator made his last harangue. To his 
hearers it seemed the incoherent mutter- 
ings of a madman ; the police arrested him, 
he was adjudged insane, and sent to the 
asylum, where he died. Thomas Evans, 
J. P., was buried in a pauper's grave, but 
his message to mankind can never die ; his 
life, as the world counts it, was a failure, — 
he died in poverty, — but who can tell what 
influences for the good of man he set in 
motion? Reading the manuscript, I found 
many familiar passages, bringing to mind 
his talks in the Sunday afternoon debates at 
the Coffee Tavern; and I can suggest the 
nature of these debates no better than by 
quoting one or two passages from this essay, 
entitled " A Common-Sense Sermon on the 
Labor Problem." 

"Society/' he says, "has the wrong 
notion that statesmen lead public opinion 
and originate reforms ; but this is merely a 



AND THE LABOR PROBLEM $7 

political dose for the simples. Statesmen do 
not lead public opinion, they follow it. Re- 
forms have to germinate and develop among 
the people themselves ; statesmen are sim- 
ply the instruments to carry out the col- 
lective will of a nation, and all legislation 
that anticipates the will of society must fail. 
Schoolmasters must sow before statesmen 
can reap. We hear much said about con- 
sistency of thought, and in my humble 
opinion it is a monstrous humbug to call 
it a moral virtue, because all social progress 
is the result of changes of opinion. What 
some people call consistency of thought, 
common sense tells me is mental stagna- 
tion. The great question before the country 
to-day, the labor question, can never be 
settled by salary-grabbing politicians. We 
must be Christians first and partisans after- 
wards. Common sense tells me there can be 
no political question which is not also a re- 
ligious question ; and all real progress must 
be by honest legislation; such legislation, 



58 THE AVERAGE CITIZEN 

however, will not come until the intelligent 
and industrious manhood of this country- 
brushes aside the bigotry and prejudice, and 
learns with Tolstoy that we cannot be saved 
separately; we must be saved collectively/' 

This seems rare common sense, and, com- 
ing from a workingman, ought to set the 
smug and comfortable to thinking. The 
man who reasoned so clearly was not a 
scholar, — I devoted many hours to trans- 
lating the manuscript, — but I will venture 
that on economic questions he could con- 
found many a doctor of philosophy. 

Let us look again at the manuscript. " In 
the saving grace of common sense/' he 
writes, " trades-unionism is not a whit bet- 
ter off than the world of practical politics. 
There are surely many political trade-union 
leaders who trade in official salaries when 
manhood and true courage are the quali- 
ties most needed; common sense plainly 
tells me that all bigots and tyrants are not 
to be found among the employers of labor. 



AND THE LABOR PROBLEM 59 

Sectional trades-unions are not wide enough 
to secure the greatest good for the greatest 
number, and I have suffered often for daring 
to oppose many movements which had the 
support of sectional unions. We have heard 
a great deal about what trades-unions have 
done, but few labor leaders can be found 
with manhood and moral courage to name 
the cruel wrongs to thousands of helpless 
and defenseless fellow men and women 
perpetrated by the selfishness of labor lead- 
ers looking for political honors." 

This workingman not only could think 
clearly, but he could reason impartially, and 
you may seek in vain among the writings 
of the partisans of capital for a more sting- 
ing arraignment of trade-unionism than is 
contained in this manuscript from the pen 
of the "Old Labor Agitator. " Thomas 
Evans was not the only man among the 
members of the debating club whose opin- 
ions are worthy of thoughtful considera- 
tion; there were many other speakers 



6o THE AVERAGE CITIZEN 

who, if they might be heard by a larger 
audience, would exert an influence on mod- 
ern thought. 

The workingmen and the employers of 
labor who attended these debates at the 
Coffee Tavern gained for themselves those 
benefits which an adequate criticism of the 
labor problem would give to the average 
citizen — a person mightily interested in 
the question if he only knew it. These men 
lived with the problem, and their know- 
ledge came at first hand. No sensational 
writer could convince them that a revolu- 
tion was imminent, nor could any apologist 
blind them to the evils pertaining to our 
present industrial system. 

What these men knew the average citi- 
zen needs to know. If he will not read the 
books upon the library shelves, he may at 
least look out upon the busy world in which 
he lives, and try to think for himself con- 
cerning this vast problem; he can touch 
elbows with the man who carries the din- 



AND THE LABOR PROBLEM 61 

ner-pail, and learn that he is a man and not 
a machine; he can talk with the man who 
employs labor, and learn that he is not the 
inhuman monster the revolutionists would 
have us believe ; then, having come to know 
the employer and the employee as they 
really are, he can set about the task of 
making them better acquainted. 



Ill 

THE MAN AND THE MACHINE 



THE MAN AND THE 
MACHINE 

IN modern manufacturing, economy is 
the dominant note. The days before the 
advent of steam and electricity were days of 
small volume of business and large profits ; 
but to-day the reverse of this condition 
obtains, and we find that as a rule the ever- 
increasing volume of business has been ac- 
companied by an ever-decreasing percent- 
age of profits. Competition has reduced the 
margin of profits to a point where the cost 
of production must be kept at the mini- 
mum by every contrivance the manufacturer 
may invent. 

Labor in its last analysis is a commodity, 
just as much as cotton, and is subject to the 
unalterable law of demand and supply; and 
the manufacturers who in these days of 



66 MAN AND MACHINE 

keen competition would keep their facto- 
ries in successful operation, paying to the 
shareholders a just interest on their invest- 
ments and at the same time furnishing 
thousands of workers with the means of 
earning a livelihood, can pay only the 
market-price for necessary commodities, 
whether cotton or labor. At the beginning 
of the last century the workingman and his 
employer were to all intents associated in 
business ; the terms of the partnership may 
have been unequal, but the relationship 
between them was practically that which 
exists in any partnership. With the advent 
of the factory system came a change, — the 
employer became essentially a buyer, the 
workingman a seller, of labor. 

Now, while labor is a commodity, like 
cotton, coal, oil, reeds, harnesses, or any 
item entering into the cost of production, 
there is added to it the human element, and 
from this springs the problem. In our age 
labor is not only the necessity of the poor, 



MAN AND MACHINE 67 

but it is the ideal of the rich. A man may 
sell cotton at a loss and say, "Never mind; 
to-morrow market conditions will change 
and my loss may return to me as a profit/' 
He may sell coal at a loss and look confi- 
dently to the future to reimburse him, — 
these things are mere material possessions ; 
but when he sells his labor, that is quite 
another thing ; for his labor is his own life. 
That is what manufacturers buy and the 
multitude of workingmen sell, — parts of 
the lives of men. 

How shall we overcome the conflict be- 
tween labor and capital ? There is but one 
way, and that way lies in the recognition of 
the common humanity of the man who 
sells and the man who buys labor. 

"Here also/' says Carl Hilty, a Swiss 
thinker, " is the reason why factory labor, 
and, in short, all mechanical occupation in 
which one does but a part of the work, 
gives meagre satisfaction, and why an arti- 
san who completes his work, oranagricul- 



68 MAN AND MACHINE 

tural laborer, is, as a rule, much more con- 
tented than factory operatives, among whom 
the social discontent of the modern world 
first uttered itself. The factory workman 
sees little of the outcome of his work. It is 
the machine that works, and he is a part of 
it. He contributes to the making of one 
little wheel, but he never makes a whole 
clock, which might be to him his work of 
art and an achievement worthy of a man." 

I recognize the truth which underlies this 
view; I recognize the aesthetic value of 
hand-made things; but I insist that indis- 
criminate condemnation of machinery is 
the child of an immature imagination. 

The machine is merely the man multi- 
plied many times, and to it attaches a spe- 
cial dignity because it increases the power 
of the man to accomplish results. Let me 
illustrate what I mean from the industry 
with which I am most familiar. The art of 
making cloth is essentially the same in the 
great mills in the City of the Dinner-Pail 



MAN AND MACHINE 69 

to-day as it was centuries ago, when the 
first textile fabric was woven. Then the raw 
material was carded, — that is to say, it was 
cleaned and the fibres laid in a uniform direc- 
tion by means of a comb in the hand of the 
carder; thus the father of Columbus carded 
wool; to-day huge engines perform the 
work of the comb, but the carding engine 
is operated, as was the comb in the old days, 
by the human hand, only the power of that 
hand is multiplied many thousand times. In 
the old days a single spinning-wheel kept 
one woman employed from daylight to dark, 
producing less yarn than the doflfers now 
take in an hour from any one of the thousand 
spindles tended by a single worker; and in 
weaving, the power-loom merely repro- 
duces the identical movements of the hands 
which wove the first textile fabric before 
recorded history began. The great steam 
engine which operates the machinery in the 
factory is perhaps the best illustration of 
this idea. A double engine of the triple 



jo MAN AND MACHINE 

expansion Corliss type, indicated at three 
thousand horse-power, is capable of pro- 
ducing the power required to raise ninety- 
nine million pounds to the height of one 
foot in one minute. How many laborers, 
think you, would be necessary to accom- 
plish this tremendous task? And the ma- 
chine itself is the perfection of mechanical 
skill: in it is the perfect adaptation of means 
to the end; it is the visible expression of 
intellectual as well as physical power, for 
by it the irresistible forces of nature are 
controlled and directed by the will of man. 
One step further. The word " machine " 
in its first meaning is a contrivance, — a 
means; in its broadest meaning it is any 
organization by which a desired effect is 
produced. Thus the whole factory is itself 
one great machine which the manager 
operates, as the weaver operates his loom ; 
and just as the weaver must understand his 
machine in all its parts, — the gears, the 
pulleys, the shafts, the cams, — so must 



MAN AND MACHINE 71 

the manager understand his men, who 
are the gears, the pulleys, the shafts, the 
cams, of his greater machine. 

As we walk through the factories and 
observe the operatives standing by their 
machines, we are liable to confuse the man 
with the machine, to fail to make the dis- 
tinction between labor and the laborer, 
between the commodity and the man who 
sells the commodity. 

" I have worked on the same machine 
for twenty years/' once said the old slasher- 
tender, to whom I have already referred, 
" until I have come to know the machine 
— and the machine to know me." The 
statement is very suggestive, and the work- 
ingman who made it had the imagination 
of a poet. " I have come to know the 
machine — and the machine to know me." 
In a sense the man does become a part of 
the machine he operates; and the more 
he becomes a part of it, the more effective 
will be his day's work. He becomes a part 



72 MAN AND MACHINE 

of the machine in that his intelligence ani- 
mates it, in that he makes himself the mas- 
ter of his instrument. 

The man who had the imagination to 
make the statement just quoted was not 
brutalized by twenty years of labor oper- 
ating machinery. I know this man in his 
own home, and I believe that in his daily 
life he deserves, as few of us do, the name 
of Christian gentleman ; and his wife, al- 
though day in and day out for many years 
she has tended eight looms in a Fall River 
cotton mill, deserves, as few women I have 
had the honor to know, the rare title of lady. 

Let us take this man and this woman 
as types of the brutalized working people, 
and in their home seek further light con- 
cerning the problem. The husband came 
to this country from Lancashire in early 
manhood, being then by trade, as he is now, 
a slasher-tender. The wife came to Amer- 
ica in childhood, attended the public schools 
until by law she was permitted to work, 



MAN AND MACHINE 73 

when she became an eight-loom weaver. 
After their marriage and a wedding journey 
from the church to their tenement, they 
returned to their work, and in the ten or 
twelve years following, saved enough from 
their wages to buy a comfortable home, 
costing perhaps three thousand dollars, and 
had in the savings banks a balance suffi- 
cient to make it seem to them that the 
wife might with prudence leave her looms 
in the noisy weave-room and devote her 
time to her home and the two daughters, 
for whom she had the ambition that they 
might receive an education which would 
remove them beyond the walls of a factory. 
Her life of comparative ease was brief, for 
within two years another child was born ; 
and after a time, fearing that the added 
expense of bringing up the newcomer 
endangered the fulfillment of her ambition 
to educate her daughters, she returned to 
the factory, and remained there until she 
had made her vision a reality. 



74 MAN AND MACHINE 

This is but one of many similar instances 
which have come under my personal obser- 
vation. I am not familiar enough with the 
man with the hoe to venture an opinion, 
but as regards the man who operates the 
machine, I cannot believe that he stands 
bowed by the weight of centuries, or that 
the influence of the machine in itself is 
brutalizing. There is much in the modern 
factory system that is brutalizing, and re- 
forms are necessary. These reforms can 
come only when the man who buys labor 
learns that he who sells labor is a human 
being like himself, and when the employee 
comes to the realization that his master is not 
a monster whose one thought is to grind the 
workingman under his feet. Laws may be 
enacted — should be enacted; but before 
they can avail greatly, a better social un- 
derstanding must exist between the man 
who buys and the man who sells labor. 

We have seen that labor is a commodity, 
just as any other necessity which enters into 



MAN AND MACHINE y 5 

the cost of production is a commodity; but 
there is added to it the human element, and 
this makes the buying of it the most diffi- 
cult task which confronts the manufacturer. 
The manager of a cotton mill buys cot- 
ton, and nobody is interested except himself 
and the broker who sells it ; he buys coal, 
and nobody cares about the terms of the 
trade except himself and the dealer who 
sells it; but when he buys labor, not only 
does his trade mean much to him, much 
to the few hundred individuals with whom 
he makes his bargain, but it means much 
to the whole army of the dinner-pail, which 
daily answers to the rollcall in all the fac- 
tories throughout the land. 

Let us now inquire more specifically into 
the problem, and see how, outside any ap- 
peal to law, a better understanding may be 
brought about between the man who buys 
and the man who sells labor. To this end 
we may take a concrete example. There 
exists to my own knowledge one factory, 



76 MAN AND MACHINE 

which for half a century has exemplified 
in its management the ideal for which I 
am contending. It is a small concern, em- 
ploying at the most not more than three 
hundred hands. The superintendent knows 
each of his men personally ; he talks with 
them about the things nearest to them, the 
little happenings in their home life, which 
are to them as dear as are the joys and sor- 
rows which lighten or make dark his own 
fireside. In event of an accident to any of 
them, the doctor's bills are paid and their 
places held for them until their recovery. 
In the fifty years of this corporation's his- 
tory, it has been called upon to defend in 
court but one tort case, and that brought 
by a miserable fellow with an illustrious 
criminal record, who tempted Providence 
to crown it by perjuring himself to obtain 
a few dollars from those who for twenty 
years had befriended him . In the fifty years 
of the history of this corporation there has 
occurred but one strike, brought about by 



MAN AND MACHINE yy 

walking delegates who knew nothing of 
the conditions which obtained there; and 
that strike lasted but seven days, when the 
men returned in a body under the condi- 
tions which had previously existed. 

The method here employed may be called 
Utopian, but the results prove it to be prac- 
tical. At the same time, the two incidents 
cited illustrate the difficulties which the 
manufacturer encounters in establishing a 
better social understanding with the work- 
ingman. The man who sells labor, as a 
rule, misunderstands his employer quite as 
often as the manufacturer misunderstands 
him. He fails to realize that his employer 
is a human being, endowed with an im- 
mortal soul, who has the welfare of his 
employees at heart; he fears the Greeks 
bearing gifts, and cannot understand that 
the man who buys labor may act from an 
altruistic motive. He often assumes the 
same attitude toward his employer which 
he fancies that his employer holds toward 



78 MAN AND MACHINE 

him, and he makes the meanest, the most 
selfish motives the basis of his trade. In my 
personal experience, the man who is most 
thoroughly hated by his employees is the 
man who has the physical, mental, and 
spiritual welfare of his workingmen most 
at heart. 

I can imagine some will say that, grant- 
ing all I have claimed for the corporation 
referred to, nevertheless it employs but a 
handful of men, and when we attempt to 
apply the same methods in a great corpora- 
tion, employing thousands, we face a differ- 
ent problem. Here neither the manager, 
the superintendent, nor the overseer can 
know personally each man in his employ. 
This is indeed true ; but the manager can 
claim from all the men in his employ the 
same loyalty, the same devotion, which the 
great general commands from his troops. 
There is in the City of the Dinner-Pail a 
man who employs as many thousand oper- 
atives as the corporation we have referred 



MAN AND MACHINE 79 

to employs hundreds ; yet with him the 
same conditions obtain, and the explana- 
tion is the one I have suggested, — this 
man possesses the essential qualities of a 
great general. 

If the factory be a small one, giving work 
to a hundred men, the manager may know 
each personally ; but if it be a large one, so 
that such personal acquaintance is imprac- 
ticable, he may know them as a general 
knows his army, — he may inspire them, 
if he be a great man, with his own spirit. 
But, says the doubtful one, this ofFscouring 
of the world, these men akin only to brutes, 
will not respond to leadership. Said Emer- 
son, "What a force was coiled up in the 
skull of Napoleon! Of the sixty thousand 
men making his army at Eylau, it seems 
some thirty thousand were thieves and 
burglars. The men whom in peaceful com- 
munities we hold with iron at their legs, in 
prisons, under the muskets of sentinels, — 
this man dealt with hand to hand, dragged 



80 MAN AND MACHINE 

them to their duty, and won his victories 
by their bayonets." Do you believe that, 
after the victory, those thirty thousand men 
thought as thieves and burglars, or needed 
to be held in irons ? And again, bowed as 
low by the weight of centuries as the pes- 
simist would have us believe these men to 
be, still are they men capable of infinite 
development, animated with the mighty 
impulse which compels the race to rise 
from worst to better, from better to best. 
The relation of the man of business to 
the thousands in his employ is in a measure 
comparable with the relation which ex- 
isted in another time between the feudal 
lord and his retainers. The retainers served 
their master in the great game of war ; to- 
day the workingman serves his master in 
the great game of business ; but with this 
difference — loyalty was the ideal of service 
in the one ; in hatred does the other serve. 
To accomplish the highest results in the 
commercial regime, loyalty must be engen- 



MAN AND MACHINE 81 

dered in the soul of the operative. This 
cannot be accomplished in a day, it must be 
the result of slow but certain growth based 
on a recognition of the common humanity 
of the man who buys and the man who sells 
labor. The feudal lord and his retainers 
understood one another because they fought 
in the same cause, faced side by side the 
same physical peril, used the same weapons. 
At the end of the battle master and man 
sought the gift of sleep in the same camp. 
They were comrades. It is not so to-day ; 
the master fights for power, the man for 
his daily bread ; the master fights with his 
mind, the man with his body; one sleeps 
in restless misery in his mansion, the other 
sleeps in discontent in his tenement. 

Let us now take a purely practical stand- 
point and look at some of the facts concern- 
ing a great strike in the textile world, which 
for five months prostrated an industry re- 
presenting a capitalization of fifty million 
dollars, condemned to idleness twenty-seven 



82 MAN AND MACHINE 

thousand operatives, and filled with misery 
and discontent a city of one hundred and 
twenty thousand persons. 

The strike was brought on by a cut- 
down in wages of twelve and one-half 
per cent. At the time, the manufacturers 
were at their wits' end in an attempt to 
operate the factories without a loss of profit 
in competition with Southern mills, which 
then enjoyed a temporary advantage in 
cheapness of labor, then, as now, unorgan- 
ized. It is due to the secretaries of the tex- 
tile unions to say that they opposed a strike, 
as the conditions pointed to certain victory 
for the manufacturers. In the excitement 
of the moment, hatred, resentment, preju- 
dice, prevailed, and the unions voted to quit 
work unless the old schedule of wages was 
restored. The condition was impossible, the 
manufacturers justly made no concession, 
and the long strike ensued. 

A suggestive fact should here be noted : 
the labor leaders opposed the strike, the 



MAN AND MACHINE 83 

sentiment of the majority of workers was 
against resistance, for but twenty-five hun- 
dred out of twenty-seven thousand opera- 
tives voted at the meetings of the unions ; 
yet a handful of enthusiasts, self-willed, un- 
mindful of the common welfare, brought 
about by their votes a calamity the evil 
results of which lasted many years. 

The question may rightly be asked, how 
did it happen, when the strike did not 
meet with the approval of the labor leaders 
and was unpopular with the mass of the 
workers, that it endured through so many 
months of bitter hardship ? Why did men 
and women whose better judgment rebelled 
against an unavailing strike accept its con- 
ditions and make no concerted effort to 
terminate it ? There are many reasons, but 
the main motive, I believe, was an unrea- 
soning loyalty to the unions as embodying 
the ideal of the rights of the workingman. 
The authorities at Washington may declare 
what we deem an unrighteous war; but 



84 MAN AND MACHINE 

when the drum beats and the call comes 
for volunteers, we are ready to offer our lives 
in the service of our country, — the indi- 
vidual sacrifices himself to the common 
cause. The strike was declared by a small 
majority of votes cast by twenty-five hun- 
dred men and women assembled at the 
meetings of the unions; yet twenty-seven 
thousand acquiesced in the result. 

This fact illustrates the power of the 
unions both for good and evil, and enforces 
the value of that ideal of loyalty to which I 
have alluded. The power of labor unions 
rests in the loyalty not only of the mem- 
bers, but of all working people, to the ideal 
which underlies the unions — the dignity 
of labor — the sacredness of the day's work. 
The fact that every workingman may not 
realize that he is loyal to an ideal does not 
alter the fact — he is loyal, and his loyalty 
underlies his every act. This loyalty gives 
a power to the unions which cannot be com- 
puted in terms of the commercial world ; 



MAN AND MACHINE 85 

it is the motive, however, animating a force 
which the commercial world must recog- 
nize and direct with judgment. 

The power of unions is unlimited, and 
may be used to the physical, mental, and 
moral advancement of the workingman, or 
it maybe directed to his destruction ; it may 
serve the advancement of mankind, or it 
may retard the increasing purpose of the 
ages. The need of labor unions, as the need 
of a nation, is for intelligent leadership. 
The power is there, — who shall direct it? 
Steam existed countless ages before Watts, 
electricity before Marconi flashed his first 
message through miles of unresisting space; 
yet ages of men and women watched the 
steam pouring from countless teapots, 
and rubbed amber for an evening's amuse- 
ment, before the master came to make these 
forces the willing servants of mankind. 

Allow me to intrude myself to the ex- 
tent of presenting my personal impressions 
of the great strike, first explaining my 



86 MAN AND MACHINE 

individual relation to the employers and 
employees. In a small way I am directly 
an employer of labor, — the machine-shops 
to which I give my daily attention employ 
perhaps three hundred hands; the cotton 
factories in the management of which I 
am indirectly associated, several thousand. 
Fromapurely commercial standpoint, then, 
my bias should have been toward the 
welfare of the manufacturers. For fifteen 
years, however, I have been associated with 
St. John's parish, composed of Lancashire 
working people and their American chil- 
dren. My association with them has been 
as intimate as my association with the man- 
ufacturers ; perhaps more intimate, because 
the less highly organized the social devel- 
opment, the greater the possibility of inti- 
mate relations. I have had the honor of 
officiating as best man at the wedding of an 
employee, of serving, in the absence of a 
clergyman, at the burial of a workingman's 
child, of holding the hand of a laborer in 



MAN AND MACHINE 87 

his last hour of life; and if I have any mes- 
sage relating to the labor problem, it is 
this, — the values of life are relative, and 
be the man born to wealth or poverty, his 
instincts and emotions are the same. 

The great strike was declared; labor 
faced capital in open battle; market con- 
ditions proclaimed that the cause of labor 
was lost; capital would suffer greatly, but 
in the end would be victorious because in 
this instance its cause was just. Twenty- 
seven thousand men and women were out 
on a strike ; this number included the peo- 
ple of all nations, — English and French, 
Irish, Portuguese, Italians, Poles, and Jews ; 
men and women whom the smug and com- 
fortable term the oifscouring of Europe. 
You might have expected a demonstration 
of force from this army ; but when at day- 
light the engines turned over in the deserted 
factories,andthefew workers, either without 
loyalty to an ideal or possessed with keener 
vision than their fellows, answered the 



88 MAN AND MACHINE 

summons of the bells, beyond a few broken 
windows, there were no evidences of vio- 
lence. Later in the day the streets of the 
city presented no unusual sights, except 
that they were more crowded, as on a holi- 
day. Men and women, who under nor- 
mal conditions would have been standing 
by their machines increasing the wealth 
of a nation, stood gazing into shop win- 
dows enjoying a leisure unknown for years. 
Here and there little groups gathered about 
one more earnest than his fellows, who 
harangued a listless audience concerning 
the rights of man. At nightfall the crowd 
dispersed, and a stranger could have found 
no evidences that a great battle was being 
waged in the city. 

In a few days mass-meetings were held 
in the theatre, at which speeches were 
made by men conspicuous in the labor 
movement, urging the workers to be true 
to the cause, — but still no violence. The 
workers were self-contained, confident of 



MAN AND MACHINE 89 

victory. Only once was there an occurrence 
suggesting public disorder. This happened 
after weeks of resistance, when the hard- 
ships of the battle had become well-nigh 
unendurable. At the close of a mass-meet- 
ing a weaver, braver than his fellows, spoke 
the truth, his motive being the common 
good. He had the intelligence to under- 
stand the situation, the vision to see that 
the existing conditions pointed to certain 
defeat for the labor cause; he had the cour- 
age of his convictions and spoke his mind. 
In a moment the meeting was in an uproar, 
and a mob followed the man of convictions 
through the main street. The man was 
rescued by the police, and the crowd dis- 
persed. The next day he returned to his 
looms, and a few followed him. To-day 
his name is a name of reproach in the City 
of the Dinner-Pail; but his little service to 
the cause of labor will live always. 

While the workers were holding mass- 
meetings, striving by every ingenuity to 



9 o MAN AND MACHINE 

maintain a lost cause, the representatives 
of capital were immersed in the endeavor 
to start the factories, to supplant in a thou- 
sand homes want with plenty, despair with 
hope. They fancied the workingman to 
be their enemy, they fought selfishly, as did 
their opponents; but in this instance they 
fought in the cause of right. Physical suf- 
fering was the lot of the laborer, — cold, 
hunger, pain. Mental stress was the lot of 
the manufacturer, — the determined effort 
to achieve, the terror of defeated hope, 
defeated ambition. Recognition of one 
fundamental fact would have relieved in a 
moment all this bodily suffering and men- 
tal stress, — the fact that whatever condi- 
tions benefit capital must benefit labor as 
well, and that any measure which, adopted, 
would be of lasting benefit to the one, must 
of necessity be of permanent advantage to 
the other. The forces of labor and the 
forces of capital waged a fierce battle, yet 
their interests were identical. Each side 



MAN AND MACHINE 91 

suffered hardships, springing from a com- 
mon cause; the battle fought by capital, 
rightly analyzed, was not against labor, but 
against market conditions, and the battle 
of labor was against the same conditions. 
If, instead of contending with one another, 
these two forces had united in the com- 
mon cause, untold suffering might have 
been avoided. 

In the end a conference was arranged to 
be held at the State House, the governor 
of the commonwealth acting within cer- 
tain limits as arbitrator. The governor was 
a manufacturer and a large employer of 
labor, who, in spite of the fact, was elected 
to his high office by the enthusiastic sup- 
port of the labor vote. He exemplified in 
his relation to his employees an ideal pre- 
viously suggested. He could not know per- 
sonally each man and woman in his employ; 
but his spirit of fair play animated his 
workers as the spirit of a great general ani- 
mates his army, and they were ready with 



92 MAN AND MACHINE 

their enthusiasm, when the opportunity- 
came, to place him in a position of influ- 
ence and opportunity. They had for him 
that loyalty which should exist on the part 
of all working people toward their em- 
ployers, and he inspired their loyalty only 
because his humane attitude toward them 
compelled their devotion. 

The conference was held in the State 
House, and the strike was ended. The 
solution was a simple matter. The margin 
between the cost of the amount of cotton 
required to make a cut of cloth and the 
market price of the same cut of cloth under 
the old schedule of wages was to be taken 
as a basis, and wages in the future were to 
be computed on that basis ; a four per cent 
advance, representing the margin then ex- 
isting, was to be made at once, and wages 
were to vary weekly with the fluctuations 
of the market. No plan could be devised of 
greater advantage to the man who bought 
and the man who sold labor ; both would 



MAN AND MACHINE 93 

share alike in the advance or depression of 
market conditions. A few days after the 
conference, smoke again poured from the 
factory chimneys, the whirr of the spin- 
dles and the ceaseless clatter of shuttles 
were again joyful sounds within the factory 
walls ; at the bell hour the army of the din- 
ner-pail again responded to rollcall, — the 
long strike was ended. 



IV 

THE TIME-CLOCK 



THE TIME-CLOCK 

LABOR is a commodity, just as is cot- 
ton, coal, or any other material making 
up the cost of production ; but there is 
added to it the human element, and out of 
this fact arises the labor problem. This 
problem includes every question at issue 
between employer and employee, whether 
it concerns wages, hours of labor, or san- 
itary conditions, and, rightly analyzed, is a 
matter of bargain between the man who 
buys and the man who sells labor. To 
understand the labor problem, we must 
first know something of the factory system 
which is one source of the present social 
unrest. 

In the beginning the factory was the 
creation, not of capital, but of labor ; not 
of the employer, but of the workingman. 



98 THE TIME-CLOCK 

It was a natural growth out of the home 
system of manufacture, under which raw 
material, either bought by the workman 
himself or given out to him by a second 
party, was manufactured into the finished 
product in the home. The transition from 
the home to the factory system may be 
studied at first hand in some countries 
to-day. In Japan, for instance, practically 
all the spinning of yarn is done in facto- 
ries, while the larger part of the cloth is 
made on hand-looms in the homes of the 
weavers. The first spinning-mill was un- 
doubtedly built by some thrifty spinner 
who, obtaining more work than he could 
well do with his own hands, hired a few 
less capable workmen to assist him ; after- 
wards he hired others, until the rooms of 
his house were too small to contain them 
and the machinery; then he built a shed 
devoted to his business, and this shed be- 
came the first cotton factory in Japan. Our 
own industrial development has been sim- 



THE TIME-CLOCK 99 

ilar, and the conditions which we may 
observe to-day in Japan once existed in 
America. 

In the early days of the nineteenth 
century a machinist's apprentice became a 
journeyman, and received from his master, 
as was the custom in those days, a new suit 
of clothes and fifty dollars in money. He 
left the town in which he lived, and sought 
employment in a neighboring village, 
where several cotton-mills had been built. 
The mill in which he found work would be 
of interest to one familiar with the great 
plants of to-day; the owners, the superin- 
tendent, the workers, were all New England 
folk, among whom there was no social dis- 
tinction. Tradition says that the weavers sat 
in rocking-chairs beside the newly-invented 
power-looms, and that some brought knit- 
ting to the mill to occupy their spare time, 
while others cultivated flowers in window- 
boxes ; but, rocking-chairs or no, employer 
and employee began work at the same hour 



ioo THE TIME-CLOCK 

each morning, returned home at the same 
hour in the evening, and after they had 
" washed up' ' and the supper dishes were put 
away, spent their evenings together. 

The power-loom seemed a marvel of 
ingenuity to the young machinist; he 
watched the machines turning out their 
useful product, and repaired them when 
they failed to work. Then the thought 
occurred to him that some day he might 
build looms and sell them to the cotton 
factories. He became acquainted with an- 
other machinist, who had already made a 
start in this direction, and the two young 
men formed a partnership, built a small 
shop, and commenced business. They 
associated with them a few other machin- 
ists, and from bell-hour to bell-hour, em- 
ployers and employees worked side by side 
at the bench and lathe. The owners of 
the shop and the men who worked with 
them were friends and neighbors who went 
to church and singing school together, and 



THE TIME-CLOCK 101 

in social life met as equals. In the shop 
disputes would arise concerning the hours 
of labor and the amount of work which 
might reasonably be expected from each 
man in his twelve hours of daily toil, and 
these questions were quarreled out in the 
evening. 

As years went by and the business grew 
larger, the employers ceased to work at 
the bench and lathe. One became superin- 
tendent and devoted his time to overseeing 
the work of the men; the other became 
treasurer and attended to financial affairs, 
keeping the books, buying the iron, selling 
the machinery, and to other matters inci- 
dent to the general management; but this 
change in occupation did not alter the close 
personal relation between them and the 
men in their employ. 

The shop produced a great variety of 
work, — not only power-looms, but steam- 
engines, turbine water-wheels, machine 
tools, shafting, hangers, pulleys, and other 



102 THE TIME-CLOCK 

appliances for the transmission of power, 
hydraulic presses, and, as is impressively- 
stated in an advertisement of the day, " ma- 
chinery generally/' Twenty men working 
together in the little shop were able to 
produce this vast array of mechanical de- 
vices ; but each of these twenty men was a 
machinist who had served an apprentice- 
ship of from five to seven years. The worker 
knew each machine he operated, and could 
make the machine with his own hands; 
the age of specialization — division of la- 
bor, it is called in the factory system — lay 
in the future. 

The machinist's son became associated 
with him in business. He did not learn the 
trade, for by this time ability in finance 
was as essential to the success of the con- 
cern as mechanical skill; and the condi- 
tions which the son faced were more com- 
plex than the conditions the father knew ; 
for the little machine-shop had become a 
modern manufacturing establishment. The 



THE TIME-CLOCK 103 

treasurer sat at his desk in the office; the 
superintendent had his desk, and under him 
were foremen who were responsible for the 
several departments of the plant. The tra- 
ditions of an older day were still vital, a close 
personal relation existed between employer 
and employee; but the organization was 
more complex and the possibility of mis- 
understanding proportionately increased. 
Moreover,industrial conditions were chang- 
ing, competition was becoming keen, the 
era of small profits and large volume of 
business was commencing. 

In the later days of the century a grand- 
son of the machinist sat at the treasurer's 
desk. His task would have been unimagin- 
able to the machinist: there were letters 
to be dictated to a stenographer, not writ- 
ten out in a bold, round hand; there were 
cost-sheets to be examined — they had not 
been so particular as to the costs in the old 
days ; the market reports had to be studied 
— there were no market reports in the days 



104 THE TIME-CLOCK 

of the machinist. The grandfather once 
sold a few water-wheels in the Southern 
States, and made two tediousjourneys,much 
of the way by stage ; the grandson received 
by mail and telegraph from the South 
daily inquiries for machinery, and some- 
times closed the bargain by telephone. 
Steam and electricity had annihilated dis- 
tance; the old order had passed, giving 
place to the new; division of labor be- 
came a necessity. 

Inside the factory conditions were quite 
as changed as in the office. One man bored 
holes, another turned studs, each had his 
little share to contribute to the finished 
whole. One hundred men, each making a 
whole machine, might in a year build one 
hundred small steam-engines ; but one man 
could bore many hundred cylinders, and an- 
other could turn many hundred cranks ; and 
thus under the changed conditions a hun- 
dred engines could be built in the time for- 
merly required to build one. The machin- 



THE TIME-CLOCK 105 

ist gave seven years of his life to learning 
his trade : he was taught how to run a lathe, 
standing before it sometimes fourteen hours 
a day ; hand and eye were trained by count- 
less repetition of the same process, until the 
man and the machine became one; mean- 
while he had learned to sharpen tools. In 
a modern shop, tool-sharpening is special- 
ized : day in and day out men point bits of 
steel ; but after a time the apprentice knew 
this trade as well as the best tool-sharpener. 
Specialization has increased the efficiency 
of the shop as an organization, but it has 
decreased the efficiency of the individual 
worker as a thinking creature. Under the 
factory system the individuality of the 
worker is lost in the great organization of 
which he is a part ; officially he has ceased 
to have a name. 

Much of our industrial discontent arises 
from the time-clock, or rather from the 
thought for which the time-clock stands. 
Wherever the time-clock is in use, each 



io6 THE TIME-CLOCK 

worker is known by a number. He pushes 
a button on the clock door when he com- 
mences or quits work, setting the mechan- 
ism in motion ; the gears revolve, a little 
lever falls and prints in blue or red ink the 
information that " 207-6.59" or " 207- 
7.01"; which means that Christopher 
Cassidy, a citizen of the United States of 
America and in the employ of the Union 
Steel Company, came to the factory that 
day at one minute before seven, or else that 
he was one minute late, for which offense 
the time-keeper is to dock his pay a quar- 
ter of an hour. Now, while it is quite right 
to fine a man for being a minute late in 
getting to his work, — if it has become a 
fixed habit, — it is equally wrong to rob 
him of his name if the crime may be 
avoided. 

To condemn the use of the time-clock 
would be absurd, for this ingenious instru- 
ment has become a necessity in thousands 
of factories where great numbers of work- 



THE TIME-CLOCK 107 

ingmen are employed; and no toiler can 
complain that the record it prints is incor- 
rect, for when he presses the button he 
becomes his own time-keeper; yet the 
relation between the employer and the 
employee which the time-clock symbolizes 
is wholly bad. This relation is graphically 
set forth in a circular I once read, adver- 
tising these machines. " Do you employ one 
hundred hands ?" it asked; " do you realize 
what the loss of five minutes a day by each 
man means to you in loss of profits in one 
year? Suppose your average wage is two 
dollars a day ; fifteen hundred hours at 
twenty cents an hour. Three hundred dol- 
lars ! Think of it ! And if you employ a 
thousand hands your loss will be three 
thousand dollars. Can you afford this?" 

At first it would seem that the only an- 
swer to the question must come in the form 
of an order for clocks ; but upon reflection 
the employers may reply : " Possibly I can 
and possibly I cannot. If I consider each 



io8 THE TIME-CLOCK 

man in my employ as a machine which the 
overseer sets in motion each morning, as 
the operative starts his loom by pressing 
the shipper-handle, I cannot afford it. But 
if I look upon the worker as a man capa- 
ble of infinite growth, then the three hun- 
dred or three thousand dollars may be as 
nothing in my cost of manufacturing. The 
day does not begin at any given moment. 
A man may press his button on the time- 
clock promptly at seven every morning 
in the year, yet the same man may cheat 
me out of three hundred hours every twelve 
months." 

The amount of work which each man 
accomplishes during the day depends upon 
other factors than the mere hours of labor ; 
and the most important of these factors is 
the spirit in which the work is done. And 
the spirit of the day's work will depend 
upon the personal relation which exists be- 
tween the office and the workshop. If the 
employer is once known to be interested 



THE TIME-CLOCK 109 

in the welfare of his men, they will be, 
more truly than otherwise, his retainers, 
more zealous for the prosperity of his busi- 
ness ; but if his relation to them is that of a 
task-master, they will be his slaves, merely, 
and quite capable of any treachery. The 
effort of the employer who would gain the 
loyal service of his men must be to pre- 
serve in every way possible the individu- 
ality of the employee, to emphasize his 
manhood, and thus to increase his self- 
respect. 

A friend of mine employs several thou- 
sand hands in his factories; he is a man 
who knows from his own experience the 
meaning of the day's toil, for he worked at 
the trade in his youth and belongs to that 
class of "risen workmen" that Shadwell 
calls hard task-masters. He, however, is a 
most humane employer. Understanding 
from experience " time-clock" conditions, 
and knowing that the industrial value of 
a man is increased with the belief in the im- 



no THE TIME-CLOCK 

portance of his own work, this ( employer has 
adopted every means to develop in his em- 
ployees a sense of their individuality. This 
is illustrated by the system of fines which 
is enforced in each department of his 
works. The man who in a week makes the 
most imperfect parts, loses a small percent- 
age of his pay, and his loss goes as a prize 
to the man who makes the least bad work. 
In the main office a chained book is hung, 
and in it are recorded the mistakes made by 
the clerks ; no penalty is exacted for these 
mistakes, but each clerk, by reading the 
record, may profit by the errors of the 
others ; and it has come to be considered a 
fearful disgrace for one to have his name 
entered in the book, so vitally does the plan 
appeal to the individuality of the employee. 
This employer also knows that the care of 
the body is the first step toward developing 
a sense of self-respect, and he has provided 
proper bathing facilities for his workers, 
means for warming the dinners brought to 



THE TIME-CLOCK in 

his factory in a thousand dinner-pails, and 
a playground for field sports on Saturday 
afternoons ; and he has spent many thousand 
dollars in improving the sanitary condi- 
tions of his plants. But, more than this, he 
is easily accessible to his men. His private 
office is carefully guarded, for his time is 
too valuable to be wantonly wasted. I have 
seen a dozen men sitting outside his door, 
waiting their turn to be received: trusted 
representatives of great selling houses; buy- 
ers of goods seeking to establish business 
relations with his firm ; perhaps a wealthy 
philanthropist collecting funds for private 
charity; and all men of no little conse- 
quence as viewed by the laborer who dif- 
fidently enters the office. But this same 
laborer has but to write his name on a piece 
of paper, and the busy man promptly re- 
ceives him — so firmly does he cling to that 
spirit of equality which characterized, in a 
marked degree, the early days of the factory 
system. 



ii2 THE TIME-CLOCK 

Side by side with the industrial develop- 
ment of the factory system, there went a 
"social" development, using the word in 
its narrow meaning as referring to that body 
of the elect which worships at the shrine 
of fashion. Even to-day the stratification of 
"Society" is one of the most interesting 
phenomena to the student of social condi- 
tions in a manufacturing community. The 
factory system is indeed, as Arthur Shad- 
well has said, " the history of workingmen 
rising to be employers" ; and in the process, 
by the acquisition of wealth and a degree of 
leisure, there comes a change in the manner 
of living. On the surface it is a small matter 
— the bean-supper becomes a dinner-party, 
the public ball a dancing-party, and the 
morning bath supersedes the Saturday night 
tubbing ; but to the student of social con- 
ditions all this has a real significance. 

The machinist who founded the corpo- 
ration, the development of which we have 
just traced, lived simply, as did the men in 



THE TIME-CLOCK 113 

his employ ; his wife was cook, parlor-maid, 
and seamstress, and it was owing to her fru- 
gality more than to any other factor that he 
was able to create an establishment which 
to-day furnishes employment to several 
hundred machinists, each living under so- 
cial conditions similar to those he knew. 
His son never wore overalls and jumper, 
never worked at the bench and lathe, and 
he was given an education which made his 
father's associates shake their heads and 
prophesy certain failure in life for the boy, 
so great was their distrust of " book-learn- 
ing." The grandson of the machinist went 
to college, and his business failure was pre- 
dicted. It would be difficult for one unfa- 
miliar with the conditions to realize the 
contempt with which an old-time machin- 
ist, trained under the apprentice system, 
looks upon a young man educated in a tech- 
nical school, or how firm is his conviction 
that a college-bred man must fail hopelessly 
if he enters business. Machinists of this 



ii4 THE TIME-CLOCK 

class may be found in any large shop ; they 
are the survivors from an older day, before 
imagination came to be the first essential of 
commercial success, and form the human 
links which unite the age of steam to the 
days of the stage-coach. In their reminis- 
cences we may trace with authority the 
changes which have taken place in the 
relation of employer and employee with 
the growth of the factory system. 

The social world in which the grandson 
lived had, like the industrial conditions, 
become complicated. If the machinist by 
some unlucky chance put a steel knife to 
his mouth, he might still be invited to the 
next bean-supper; but should the grandson 
fail to call either in person or by pasteboard 
on his hostess of two weeks before, his 
name might be dropped from her list. This 
social aspect had its influence in creating the 
labor problem, for the personal touch be- 
tween employer and employee necessarily 
became weaker and weaker with the pro- 



THE TIME-CLOCK 115 

gress of social development. Moreover, an 
aristocracy of wealth arose in which the 
heartless condescension of an aristocracy of 
blood was emphasized by a sort oireductio ad 
absurdum. It is no less a sin to look down 
upon a man because his grandfather did not 
live on Beacon Hill than to despise him 
because he earns his daily bread by the sweat 
of his brow; but the latter sin is the more 
obvious. 

I sometimes look out of my window 
when the bell rings from the schoolhouse 
across the street; the children who come 
up the hill are ragged, some of them, while 
some, who come from the opposite direc- 
tion, are brought in fine carriages driven by 
liveried coachmen. On the surface they 
belong to different classes, yet their fathers 
are engaged in the same business — the 
making of cotton cloth. It is true that their 
fathers go in different social "sets/ 5 yet in 
the mill the labor of each is essential to the 
welfare of the industry. The children, 



n6 THE TIME-CLOCK 

however, are of the same "set," and in the 
democracy of the schoolyard mingle in 
their play, for as yet they have not learned 
the tremendous significance of clothes. The 
father of one of the children, who came 
to school in a motor-car, was offered a 
position of trust in a factory, and his little 
daughter, when she heard the news, cried, 
fearing that she might be asked to carry 
his dinner to him in a pail. When the 
girl is grown to be a woman, she may laugh 
at this incident, yet it is full of significance. 
There are many families in every manu- 
facturing town which conform to the 
democracy of the schoolyard — men and 
women, who, in their attitude toward the 
toilers, foretell that better understanding be- 
tween the man who buys and the man who 
sells labor, which is the solution of the pre- 
sent problem ; because they have not worked 
with their hands, they are better able to 
view the complex life of the community 
in true perspective ; but during the process 



THE TIME-CLOCK 117 

of rising from bench and lathe to leather- 
bottomed chair and desk telephone, the 
workingman is apt to view the problem 
with distorted vision. 

The history of the machine shops which 
we have here briefly considered is the his- 
tory, I believe, of nearly all similar manu- 
facturing companies in the country, and 
the facts in the development of the factory 
system which we have observed in a par- 
ticular case are applicable, also, to other 
industries. 

In the history of the factory system two 
main factors appear which have a direct 
bearing on our modern industrial unrest,' 
both tending to minimize the importance 
of the individual worker and to create a 
laboring and an employing class. Division 
of labor is the first of these factors — the 
expression [in the industrial world of that 
specialization which in scholarship has 
replaced the broader culture of our fathers 
with the more precise learning of to-day, 



n8 THE TIME-CLOCK 

and in the professions has given us doctors 
of medicine whose knowledge of anatomy 
is confined to a single organ, lawyers who 
are unable to address a jury, and clergymen 
who cannot preach sermons. I am not argu- 
ing against this specialization, — there is 
much to be said to its advantage ; but it has 
a tendency, in the professions, to a narrower 
culture, and in the workshop, to the elim- 
ination of the individuality of the worker. 
Division of labor was made a necessity 
by the discovery of the power of steam and 
electricity, which united nation with na- 
tion, thus creating a world-market. It was 
the need for a larger production which 
compelled the son of the machinist, quite 
unconsciously, to adopt the new system; 
and the moment he adopted it, the indi- 
viduality of each worker in his employ 
counted for less. The loss of the individu- 
ality of the worker under the factory system 
was, I believe, the direct cause of unionism. 
The worker could no longer approach his 



THE TIME-CLOCK 119 

employer directly as man to man, and in 
order to make himself of force he was com- 
pelled to combine his efforts with the efforts 
of others, and unionism was the result. 

The value of trade-unions is a subject 
too broad for our present discussion, but 
that the movement is of value to the work- 
ingman cannot be denied. That it may 
serve the employer in his relation with the 
employee, I believe, is likewise true. Grave 
mistakes have been made by organized 
labor, such as opposition to the introduc- 
tion of improved machinery, the attempt 
to limit the number of apprentices, and the 
many abuses in vogue in union shops ; but 
the movement is growing in strength, and, 
as it grows, becomes more conservative. It 
is hard to believe that less than a century 
ago any combination of workingmen was 
punishable under the common law by im- 
prisonment, yet such is the fact. To-day 
not only is the right of combination en- 
couraged by law, but privileges are granted 



120 THE TIME-CLOCK 

workingmen to further the principle of 
collective bargaining — a movement which 
seeks to place the worker in the same re- 
lation to his employer as that which ex- 
isted between them in the beginning of the 
factory system. 

The labor problem in one aspect is how 
justly to divide the profits of industry be- 
tween the man who buys and the man who 
sells labor. This division of profits must ac- 
complish two things — first, the employer 
must receive a fair return on his invested 
capital, and, second, the employee must 
receive a living wage. This condition ob- 
tained in the old days when master and man 
worked side by side in the shop ; and it is 
to-day the condition by which a more equi- 
table industrial order may be established. 
Professor Ryan has pointed out the possi- 
bility of a distribution of profits under 
which every capable worker may receive 
a living wage; the method by which he 
would accomplish this result — by act of 



THE TIME-CLOCK 121 

legislature — we need not here consider; 
but granting the possibility of a living wage, 
one way to establish it is by collective bar- 
gaining, based on the fact that no trade 
is a good one, nor in the long run profit- 
able, unless both parties to it are satisfied. 
No combination of employers can long 
conduct an industry in which the workers 
are with reason discontented, and no com- 
bination of workers can continue to de- 
mand and obtain an undeserved share of the 
profits. The problem involved in collective 
bargaining is the same problem which 
master and man faced when they quarreled 
out their differences as they worked side 
by side in the shop, only multiplied many 
times ; and its solution lies in the same fair- 
ness and mutual respect which, in an earlier 
day, restored harmony between two antag- 
onistic shopmates — the parties to an indi- 
vidual bargain. 



TRADE-UNIONISM AND THE 
INDIVIDUAL WORKER 



TRADE-UNIONISM AND 

THE INDIVIDUAL 

WORKER 

AS we walk the streets of the City of 
the Dinner-Pail, enter its factories, 
and visit the homes of its people, — the 
homes alike of those who buy and those 
who sell labor, — we may observe in the 
varied life about us every phase of the 
labor problem, which, when viewed in the 
larger field of the nation, appears so com- 
plicated to the average citizen that he de- 
spairs of understanding it. If we were to 
study ever so casually the history of the 
great industry which gives the city its dis- 
tinction, we should discover the source of 
many perplexing social questions which in 
America tend to separate class from class 



126 TRADE-UNIONISM AND 

in a manner singularly at variance with 
the ideals of the Republic. 

In the early days of the last century, 
the wives of farmers who tilled the fields 
now traversed by the city streets, sat be- 
fore the spinning-wheel and hand-loom 
after the work upon the farm was done, and 
wove the cloth from which their gowns 
were made; they wove linen, too, from 
flax grown upon their own land, and even 
the woolen clothes the farmer wore were 
the product of household industry. It is not 
difficult to imagine the interest of these 
farmer-folk in the first factory which was 
built upon the stream ; their refusal to be- 
lieve that a water-wheel might be made of 
sufficient power to operate so great a plant 
as that first factory, which in size would 
not serve as an engine-room for a mod- 
ern spinning-mill; their wonder as they 
watched the imported machinery, pro- 
ducing more yarn in a day than a thou- 
sand hands might make on spinning-wheels 



THE INDIVIDUAL WORKER 127 

during a long winter. We can imagine, 
too, how eagerly the sons and daughters 
of the farmers sought work in the new 
factory, and the pride they took in receiv- 
ing their wages, paid in money and ex- 
changeable at the village store for stylish 
foreign fabrics such as no farmer's wife 
could ever weave. 

That successful first mill was followed 
by another and another, each indeed small, 
but each somewhat larger and better 
equipped than those that went before, and 
all operated by native help, with now and 
then a foreign worker of Irish or English 
birth. More factories were built, and for- 
eigners came in great numbers to operate 
the machinery; but the transition from 
native help was so gradual that the citi- 
zens did not realize how social classes 
were forming in this democratic com- 
munity. The newly built Roman Catho- 
lic church gave the Protestants something 
of a shudder, especially when its commu- 



128 TRADE-UNIONISM AND 

nicants celebrated Christmas; and the puri- 
tanical proprietors, who had not learned to 
exchange gifts in memory of our Saviour's 
birth, complained because the Irish refused 
to work on the twenty-fifth of December. 
Here was the first suggestion of conflicting 
social ideals. 

The immigrants, however, had no part 
in the event which made evident the 
growth of class consciousness in the City 
of the Dinner-Pail ; that occurred in a 
Baptist meeting-house and among Chris- 
tian folk of the same denomination. A 
bill had been introduced in the state legis- 
lature limiting the hours of factory labor 
to ten a day, and agitation in favor of its 
adoption ran high. On the farm the day 
began at no particular hour, nor was there 
any stated time when work was ended, 
and a man was paid for a day's labor with- 
out regard to the length of it. Some, how- 
ever, saw a distinction between farm and 
factory labor, and among these was the 



THE INDIVIDUAL WORKER 129 

minister of the Baptist church. One Sun- 
day at the hour of service, the congrega- 
tion, in which mill-owners and operatives 
sat side by side, was thrown into great 
excitement by the pastor, who preached a 
sermon advocating the ten-hour bill; and 
when his hearers filed out of the meeting- 
house that morning, they were no longer 
a united body. The man who sold labor 
continued to listen to the preaching of 
the ten-hour parson; but the man who 
bought labor built for himself another 
meeting-house; and soon afterwards the 
first labor union was formed. The same 
causes which for years had been at work 
silently to create discord in the Baptist 
flock had at the same time been in opera- 
tion in the factory, gradually separating 
the employer and employee in their per- 
sonal relations, until at last it seemed that 
their interests were no longer common, and 
that the future success of each must be to 
the disadvantage of the other. So indus- 



1 3 o TRADE-UNIONISM AND 

trial warfare took the place of mutual 
good-will, and more than half a century 
passed before the contending factions be- 
gan to see the folly of their antagonism. 

The development of unionism was as 
natural as the development of the factory 
system, which made the association of 
workers necessary. So long as factory- 
owners and factory operatives worked side 
by side in the shop, so long as the man 
who bought and the man who sold labor 
belonged to the same social class, so long 
as a close personal relation existed between 
master and man, there was no need for 
organized labor ; but when, in the compli- 
cated development of the factory system, 
the employer, once associated in business 
with the employee, found in the manage- 
ment of the concern his sole occupation, 
and became separated from the workman 
by a hierarchy of foremen and overseers, 
— the personal relation between the buyer 
and the seller of labor being lost, — it 



THE INDIVIDUAL WORKER 131 

came about quite naturally that the work- 
man combined his efforts with the efforts 
of others of his class in order to command 
collectively that consideration from the 
employer which each employee had re- 
ceived individually in the earlier stages of 
the factory system. First, the men in sep- 
arate shops talked over their common in- 
terests in friendly discussions while at their 
work ; later they continued these discus- 
sions in the evening at some appointed 
meeting-place — and the local trade-union 
was born. With the growth of class con- 
sciousness, local federations of labor fol- 
lowed, recognizing the common interests 
of all hand-workers in the community; 
and these federations in turn became united 
in a national labor movement, in which 
the welfare of the individual became sub- 
ordinated to the welfare of the toilers as 
a class. 

In administrative principles the national 
labor movement has shown two divergent 



1 32 TRADE-UNIONISM AND 

tendencies : the Knights of Labor sought 
to establish a strong central body, the ob- 
ject being to unite in a single organization 
all the workingmen of the nation, while 
the American Federation of Labor, subse- 
quently organized, has endeavored to keep 
all legislative power in the hands of the 
several crafts — the Federation being little 
more than an advisory centre. This plan, 
recognizing in a larger measure the value 
of the individual, has been the more suc- 
cessful, for since the year 1886, when the 
Knights of Labor numbered over seven 
hundred thousand members, that body has 
rapidly declined in numbers and power, 
while the American Federation has stead- 
ily increased in influence, and to-day pos- 
sesses all the machinery necessary to 
achieve the end for which it was created ; 
namely, to emphasize the human element 
which is attached to labor as a commodity. 
How well adapted to its purpose this 
machinery is, those who follow the events 



THE INDIVIDUAL WORKER 133 

in the labor-world are well aware. We 
see how the demands for higher wages, 
for shorter hours, for more favorable fac- 
tory conditions, have been enforced; some- 
times by actual strike, more often by the 
mere threat on the part of the unions to 
call out their members. When we come 
to study the history of labor unions, we 
find that the part which the movement 
has played in the social progress of the 
toiler is greater than at first appears. The 
reform laws passed by the British Parlia- 
ment in the last century had their begin- 
ning in the class-consciousness which arose 
in the manufacturing cities, following the 
establishment of the factory system. The 
first of these acts legalized combinations 
of workingmen, and thus liberated a force 
which was felt in later legislation, having 
for its object the amelioration of the social 
condition of the toilers. " Mercy by Stat- 
ute" — Lord Ashley's phrase to describe 
the British Factory Acts, made law through 



i 3 4 TRADE-UNIONISM AND 

his devoted struggle for the cause of labor 
— was due in no small measure to the 
rise of trade-unionism. As early as 1833 
laws were passed to regulate the labor of 
children and young persons in the textile 
factories of the United Kingdom; but it 
was nearly ten years later before public 
attention was called to the pitiable condi- 
tion of a class of juvenile workers which 
exceeded tenfold in number those engaged 
in the textile industries; and the reason 
for this delay is to be found in the fact 
that bleacheries and print-works, paper- 
mills, establishments for the manufacture 
of glass and earthenware, pins and needles, 
buttons, and a hundred like commodities, 
were not conducted on the great scale of 
the textile plants, nor were these industries 
confined to manufacturing cities, popu- 
lated by men and women with common 
industrial and social interests. The chil- 
dren thus employed were neglected longer 
than the others, because there were no agi- 



THE INDIVIDUAL WORKER 135 

tators to plead their cause, and no vast body 
of discontented workers clamoring for the 
amelioration of their social condition. 

From the year 1824, when Parlia- 
ment repealed the Combination Laws, to 
the Trade Disputes Act in 1906, the 
weapon of the British workingman in ob- 
taining legislative benefits has been agita- 
tion through unionism. The first labor 
agitators in the City of the Dinner-Pail 
were English operatives of the same stock 
as the men who, a generation before, 
lighted the torch of individual freedom 
in Lancashire, and, despised by the gov- 
erning classes, meeting secretly as outlaws, 
compelled a reluctant parliament to give 
heed to the rights of labor, and in the end 
to grant schools and the franchise to the 
children of toil. While in America trade- 
unionism had no such mighty task to ac- 
complish, political equality being already 
established, the conditions of the factory 
system made the movement a necessary 



136 TRADE-UNIONISM AND 

one, and it would be idle to deny the in- 
fluence of organized labor in shaping the 
course of legislative enactment. 

Granting, then, that organized labor is 
possessed of the machinery necessary to ob- 
tain its object, and that this object is alto- 
gether admirable, being nothing less than 
winning from the industrial regime a recog- 
nition of the dignity of the laborer as a 
man, unionism should merit the unfalter- 
ing loyalty of every toiler. Many working- 
men, however, and among them some of 
the most intelligent, are opposed to organ- 
ized labor, and on the very ground that it 
detracts something from the dignity of the 
individual. There is evidently some phase of 
the movement which we have overlooked. 

So far as organized labor has been suc- 
cessful in emphasizing the distinction be- 
tween labor and the laborer, the commodity 
and the man who sells the commodity, and 
has replaced the personal relation which 
once existed between the employer and the 



THE INDIVIDUAL WORKER 137 

employee with an equitable regime of col- 
lective bargaining, unionism has been an 
untold blessing to the toiling millions — a 
blessing alike to skilled and unskilled labor. 
There is, however, another side to the shield. 
Unionism came into being to emphasize the 
dignity of the laborer as a man — it resulted 
from a highly organized industrial system, 
in which the individual played an insigni- 
ficant part. Then unionism, in turn, became 
highly organized, so that to-day its chief 
danger is not to the employer, but to the 
employee, and lies in the direction of the 
evil which it was established to overcome. 
The object of unionism is to assert the dig- 
nity of the individual worker as a man; and 
while, by the very act of combination, the 
laborer surrenders his will to that of the ma- 
jority, he does it for the sake of demanding 
from the factory system a recognition of his 
personality; that besides being one little 
wheel in the vast industrial machine, he may 
be a man as well. 



138 TRADE-UNIONISM AND 

Important as the benefits of unionism 
have been, we are, nevertheless, apt to over- 
emphasize them and to forget that the 
movement is but one phase of the progress 
which the mass of mankind is still making 
towards the full consciousness of freedom. 
The value of unionism is in the loyalty 
of its members, not to an organization 
merely, but to the inclusive cause of labor. 
" Loyalty," says JosiahRoyce, " is the Will 
to Believe in something eternal, and to 
express that belief in the practical life of a 
human being/' Now, the cause of labor, 
uniting in itself the lives of all the workers, 
is an eternal cause ; its object is to advance 
the consciousness of human freedom among 
the masses; and unionism is but one means 
by which loyalty to this cause may be 
expressed. The moment, therefore, that 
unionism demands of its members a special 
loyalty to an organization which exists 
only as a means of furthering an eternal 
cause, this narrow loyalty becomes a menace 



THE INDIVIDUAL WORKER 139 

to every worker whose name is not enrolled 
upon the union lists ; when it entails a dis- 
regard for duties which each man owes to 
every other fellow man, unionism ceases to 
advance the cause of labor, and becomes 
instead a hindrance. 

That unionism is often unmindful of the 
inclusive cause of labor is illustrated by the 
policy of a minimum wage. The intent of 
this policy is, of course, favorable to the 
cause of labor, in that it aims to raise the 
standard of wages ; but in the present stage of 
our industrial development the policy fails 
to accomplish this result ; for a minimum 
wage is usually determined by the average 
ability of all the workers in any shop adopt- 
ing the plan, and the employer, forced to 
pay the uniform rate to workers incapable 
of earning it, finds it necessary, in order that 
his cost of production shall not exceed that 
of his competitors, to withhold from many 
superior workmen a rate of wages higher 
than the minimum, which otherwise they 



i 4 o TRADE-UNIONISM AND 

might receive. Thus the minimum wage 
tends to become a common wage, the un- 
earned increase granted the incapable work- 
ers being paid from the earnings of their 
more efficient shopmates. The policy, there- 
fore, is sharply antagonistic to the develop- 
ment of efficiency in the individual worker ; 
it stunts his growth as a man by setting a 
limit to his ambition ; it assumes equal effi- 
ciency among all the members of any craft, 
and by placing equal value upon an hour's 
labor without regard to the quality of it, 
destroys the reward of ambition. 

A fact too frequently neglected in con- 
sidering the relation of trade-unionism to 
the individual worker is that there are dis- 
tinct classes even among wage-workers. 
First, we have the vast army of unskilled 
labor, constantly recruited from the swarm 
of immigrants who daily pass the inspectors 
at Ellis Island: wanderers from the old 
world who have never learned a trade come 
to take their places in our industrial order 



THE INDIVIDUAL WORKER 141 

as common laborers. As we review the 
army, our first thought is one of fear for the 
permanence of a state which so freely har- 
bors this uncouth and unschooled throng, 
and we sympathize for the moment with 
those labor leaders who look askance at the 
newcomers, seeing in their presence here 
a degrading influence upon American labor. 
But if we look more searchingly into the 
faces of this eager throng passing with high 
hopes through the gateway of the new 
world, our fears will be dispelled, for im- 
migration calls for courage and every other 
personal quality which makes for social 
progress ; they have left their old homes 
in quest of a more favorable environment 
for individual growth ; in America they find 
that environment, and thousands of them 
make the most of it. 

The immigrant, on his arrival in America 
without a trade, in most cases without a 
knowledge of the language even, frequently 
the victim of unscrupulous men who seek 



142 TRADE-UNIONISM AND 

to exploit his labor, begins work at a dis- 
advantage and at a wage approximating the 
meagre income to which he was accus- 
tomed in the old world. Many employers 
will say that to pay him higher wages is to 
make him indolent, and there is a foundation 
for the statement. At home his wh ole life has 
been a battle for mere existence, there was 
no margin of wages to be saved, and quite 
naturally, when in the new world he earns 
a wage sufficient to provide food, clothes, 
and shelter, and have a penny beside, he 
does not save this penny but spends it to buy 
immunity from toil. After a time, how- 
ever, he becomes acquainted with men and 
women of his own race who are no longer 
strangers in the new world ; he visits them 
in their homes, and finds that the floors 
are carpeted, that the children go to school 
and wear clean frocks, that the table is served 
with meat and fresh vegetables ; then he 
begins to note a difference between life in 
the old world and the new, and he desires 



THE INDIVIDUAL WORKER 143 

the luxuries his friends enj oy. He begins to 
look beyond to-day, and becomes ambitious 
for the future. Soon his children go well 
dressed to school and return to a well-kept 
home ; the immigrant has entered the 
second class of labor, the characteristic of 
which is thrift. 

There is a higher class of labor, and one 
of vast importance in the evolution by 
which the worker of to-day becomes the 
employer of to-morrow : it consists of those 
who are not only ambitious for their own 
success and the success of their children, 
but who look beyond the pay-envelope even, 
and find happiness in work well done. A 
machinist recently died in the City of the 
Dinner-Pail who for nearly half a century 
had been in the employ of one corporation; 
year after year he worked at the same lathe 
until its very ways of hardened steel were 
worn beyond further service, and in all that 
time his interest in the affairs of the shop 
could have been no greater had he, him- 



i 4 4 TRADE-UNIONISM AND 

self, been sole proprietor. Sometimes he 
bought tools with his own money to facili- 
tate his work, and he refused to charge 
many an hour of overtime because the labor 
had not been exacted of him ; he looked 
upon his trade as a fine art and took the 
same joy in a perfected mechanism that the 
painter takes in his finished picture. While 
this machinist was, no doubt, an exception, 
there are many who work with the same 
joy of service ; and when, in addition to 
their love of labor and knowledge of their 
trade, they have executive ability as well, 
these men leave behind them the bench 
and lathe and become themselves employers 
of labor. 

Because the workers are divided into 
these and many more classes, the task at- 
tempted by unionism to create an average 
craftsman and then set its machinery at 
work in his interest is not only a difficult 
matter to accomplish, but is in result hos- 
tile to the development of the individual. 



THE INDIVIDUAL WORKER 145 

It may be quite true, as the Socialist con- 
tends, that we should take even greater 
care to improve the social organism, of 
which we are a part, than to perfect our 
own individual growth ; and that the per- 
fect development of each individual is not 
the highest development of his own per- 
sonality, but learning to fill, in the best 
possible way, his own little place in the 
social world. This is the old question of 
the one and the many which has given 
philosophers in every field of thought no 
end of trouble, for the reason that neither 
ideal is alone sufficient. Like the citizens 
of a state, the union workers are united by 
a common interest into an organized com- 
munity; but just as, in the state, each in- 
dividual relinquishes only the right to do 
those things which hamper his own phys- 
ical and moral growth^ — and thus the 
physical and moral growth of the com- 
munity, — and relinquishes nothing which 
makes for a higher individual and conse- 



146 TRADE-UNIONISM AND 

quently a higher social attainment, so the 
worker, by his act of association with his 
fellows, does not sacrifice his right to a 
well-rounded individual development. 

Not long ago the King of England 
touched with his sword the shoulder of a 
working mason, who knelt before him, 
and said, "Arise, Sir William Crossman." 
A man was raised to the honor of knight- 
hood in a country where little more than 
a generation ago his espousal of the labor 
cause would have brought him before the 
law courts on the charge of conspiracy. 
Surely unionism has served with power 
the progress of human freedom. It is pos- 
sible that the movement may still serve, 
and with increasing power, the progress 
of mankind, but to-day there may be ob- 
served elements of danger to this free serv- 
ice. The average citizen has an interest 
in this matter, and should study the facts 
with care. The value of unionism has 
ever consisted in the emphasis it has placed 



THE INDIVIDUAL WORKER 147 

on the dignity of the individual ; to pre- 
serve its usefulness in advancing the wel- 
fare of the workman, unionism must hold 
fast to this purpose. 

There was once a time when the glory 
of a state was told in the chronicles of its 
wars; the soldier was then the hero and 
physical prowess the measure of his great- 
ness; the soldier indeed was king and the 
king the state. True, there were crafts- 
men in those days, but few in number 
compared with the soldiers; and there 
were husbandmen, who tilled the soil that 
the women and priests might not starve, 
and that a great feast should be spread 
when the lord of the castle rode back vic- 
torious from the wars. But with the rise 
of democracy the position of the crafts- 
man and the husbandman, the workers of 
the world, was vastly changed; the worker 
became the important person, while the 
soldier was tolerated only to protect him 
in his industry. And the history of the 



148 TRADE-UNIONISM AND 

state since the dawn of the new doctrine 
has been dominated by the progress of the 
workingman. 

Slowly throughout the centuries the 
consciousness of freedom had been devel- 
oping in the minds of men. Magna Charta, 
while containing many benefits for the 
people, was in no sense a declaration of 
freedom; the Barons planted the seed 
merely, seed which for five hundred years 
slowly matured, until the industrial revo- 
lution, which occurred but a century ago, 
made possible the ripening of the fruit in 
our own generation. With the industrial 
revolution came the factory, and about 
the factory the city sprang up, populated 
by a people whose interests were identical. 
Great cities already existed, but they were 
peopled by men and women occupied 
with divers activities ; in the factory towns 
a single occupation gave a livelihood to 
thousands, leading these thousands to unite 
their efforts for the advancement of their 



THE INDIVIDUAL WORKER 149 

condition, which in the end made for the 
progress of human freedom throughout 
the world. 

The advent of the factory in England, 
however, created, at first, a reign of great 
misery among the workers. Not even the 
galley slaves in the ancient world suffered 
in mind and body the tortures which 
were the daily life of the early factory 
operatives. In Manchester, when the ten- 
hour law was first agitated, one half the 
population sought public charity in bring- 
ing their children into the world, and of 
these children less than one half lived 
until their fifth year. The survivors at the 
age of seven began to work in the facto- 
ries, thousands of them slaving under cruel 
taskmasters who used the lash without 
mercy throughout the fourteen hours of 
daily toil ; the factory became the plague- 
spot of immorality, concerning which we 
have many a painful contemporary record : 
"Fathers have sworn to it," says The 



ISO TRADE-UNIONISM AND 

Chronicle, "and wished they had been 
childless. " As we walk the streets of the 
City of the Dinner-Pail and mingle with 
the self-respecting throng of quiet-man- 
nered, neatly dressed mill-girls, or enter 
its factories where no child under fourteen 
years of age may be allowed to work ; as 
we visit the homes of the operatives and 
note in how great a measure happiness or 
misery depends upon individual thrift, we 
marvel at the progress wrought by the 
last century in the social condition of the 
workingmen. 

Just as the women spun cotton, wool, 
and flax, upon the farms where now stand 
the great factories of the City of the Din- 
ner-Pail, so for centuries before the inven- 
tions of Arkwright, the British craftsmen 
made the textile fabrics of a nation upon 
spinning-wheels and hand-looms in their 
own homes. When the factories were 
built, this vast company of workers was 
thrown upon the world without gainful 



THE INDIVIDUAL WORKER 151 

employment. Some were taught to oper- 
ate the machinery within the factory 
walls, but thousands were unable to learn 
a new trade, and the condition of these 
was so deplorable that years afterward, 
when the conscience of the nation would 
no longer permit half-naked women and 
children to do the work of beasts of bur- 
den in the dark caverns of the coal-mines, 
these hand-loom weavers hailed the event 
with joy and gladly offered themselves for 
this brutalizing employment. It is small 
wonder, then, that the labor movement 
began with violence, and that the crafts- 
men, dispossessed of their means of liveli- 
hood, avenged themselves by breaking 
machinery and burning factories. 

The factory hand produced a hundred- 
fold more yarn and cloth than the crafts- 
man, and the cry of over-production 
was heard throughout the manufacturing 
world; wages fell until a day of toil 
bought but another day of greater misery, 



1 52 TRADE-UNIONISM AND 

and starvation seemed to be the gift which 
machinery had brought to the worker. 
Thus the cause of the dispossessed crafts- 
men and that of the operatives who took 
their places became one — the cause of 
labor, the right of men by virtue of their 
human birth to something higher than 
the lives of beasts, to the creation of a 
social environment, by legislation if need 
be, in which the individual might develop 
his own personality. Then, because it was 
a crime for workingmen to meet and dis- 
cuss the evils they endured, unionism was 
born in secret chambers, from which 
went forth the agitators who became the 
pioneers of industrial freedom. What these 
men accomplished for human progress is 
recorded in the history of the reform par- 
liaments of the last century ; it is recorded, 
too, in the political history of every civil- 
ized nation. In the great movement for 
the political enfranchisement of the masses, 
which was the most conspicuous social 



THE INDIVIDUAL WORKER 153 

phenomenon of the last century, organ- 
ized labor played no insignificant part; 
and the fundamental ideal which ani- 
mated this movement was the dignity of 
the individual and the right of every man 
to the fullest possible scope for the devel- 
opment of his own personality. 

Those who mark the evolution under- 
lying our present civilization are coming 
to believe with Mr. Benjamin Kidd, who 
long ago advanced the theory, that the 
people, having been admitted to equal 
political rights, are next to be admitted 
to equal social opportunity. It may be 
that in this next and greater stage of the 
progress of the masses, trade-unionism is 
to play no part; that the narrowness of 
its organization, working in the interest 
of a select class of workers, may prevent 
the movement from further advancing the 
cause of labor. There is much in the pre- 
sent attitude of the organization to give 
ground for this belief, but those who 



i 5 4 TRADE-UNIONISM AND 

appreciate the service of unionism in the 
past still hope that its usefulness is not 
outworn. The function of unionism has 
ever been to emphasize the human ele- 
ment which is attached to labor as a com- 
modity, to assist in creating an environ- 
ment in which the individual toiler may 
have free scope for the development of 
his own personality. In the coming social 
evolution some factor must contribute this 
function; shall that factor be organized 
labor ? If the cause of unionism is made 
identical with the cause of labor, and thus 
ministers to the social progress of every 
workingman, we may believe that trade- 
unionism still has a work to accomplish; 
but if the movement is to minister to a 
class of workingmen only, its usefulness is 
already at an end. For the cause of labor 
is an eternal cause, in which the lives of 
all the wage-workers are united; and its 
object is to advance the consciousness of 
human freedom throughout the world. 



THE INDIVIDUAL WORKER 155 

Such a cause, from its very nature, must 
guarantee to every workingman that full 
measure of individual growth which is 
the priceless gift of freedom. And this 
right to a well-rounded personal develop- 
ment is no part of a narrow individual- 
ism; it does not mean that the individual 
shall cease to make sacrifices for the wel- 
fare of his fellow men, but, rather, that 
the worker, advancing to a richer personal 
life, shall come to the knowledge that 
man as man is free, and to a full conscious- 
ness of that freedom which is perfect 
service. 



VI 

THE CITY OF LUXURY 



THE CITY OF LUXURY 

AFTER a winter spent in the City of 
the Dinner-Pail, in the midst of its 
busy life and in touch with that vast army 
of toilers which daily marches to the sound 
of the factory bells, I found myself, when 
summer came, comfortably settled on a sea- 
girt farm near Newport. At first it was 
difficult to realize that the scenes about me 
and the scenes in the life of the toiler, to 
which I was so accustomed, were parts of 
the same drama. Yet the scenes so differ- 
ent are intimately connected, and there is 
more than passing significance in the fact 
that Fall River and Newport are separated 
by only twenty miles of railway track. 

At Newport no factory bell awakes the 
sleeper in the early morning hours ; the hum 
of industry does not reach the ear at noon- 



160 THE CITY OF LUXURY 

day — here is no camping ground for the 
Army of the Dinner-Pail. No, this quaint 
old city by the sea has nothing to suggest 
of wealth in the making — it speaks rather 
of wealth accumulated, and by its splendid 
pageantry dazzles the imagination with vis- 
ions of America's material prosperity. Here 
is more magnificence than you may find in 
the courts of kings — the lavish display of 
princes in a democracy where all men are 
created equal. 

My first impression of Newport, how- 
ever, had nothing to do with its lavish 
pageantry — it related rather to the toil of 
fisher-folk and farm-hands, and thus in the 
end became the means of unifying in my 
mind the problems suggested by the two 
cities. The farm was situated on the point 
which reaches out toward Brenton's Reef, 
on which, some weeks before, a fishing 
steamer had been wrecked. For several 
days I studied the stranded vessel, wonder- 
ing how long it might be before the sea 



THE CITY OF LUXURY 161 

would break it up, and if the ship were 
copper-fastened, and if so, how many 
barrels of driftwood I might find along 
the beach to burn in my study fire when 
the winter evenings came. But others had 
looked upon the wreck who had no thought 
of driftwood fires and colored flames, but 
who saw anchored there upon the rocks 
a whole season's fuel for their homes ; and 
these men set about to do themselves what I 
had hoped the wind and waves might do for 
me. There on the reef lay the wrecked 
vessel, to me a picturesque sight, suggesting 
wind and weather and the perils of the sea ; 
but to the farmers and the fisher-folk it 
suggested cords of firewood and a winter 
day's necessity. 

Three companies engaged in reclaiming 
the wreck : one of Greek fishermen, whose 
huts stand on the beach near by, one of 
Portuguese farmers, whose scant acres lie 
some miles to the north, the other of farm- 
hands employed on one of the nearby 



1 62 THE CITY OF LUXURY 

estates. The work, begun in the afternoon 
when the tide was rising, was carried on 
until midnight. Men with ropes about 
their bodies swam to the wreck, and reach- 
ing it, hauled great hawsers from the shore; 
these they made fast forward, aft, and 
amidships. On shore yokes of oxen and 
teams of horses strained and tugged at the 
hawsers, wresting from the sea its lawful 
booty, and at last hauling the huge disman- 
tled craft upon the nearer rocks. 

The ship, being derelict, was anybody's 
property, so the work was carried on by 
moonlight, lest others who had not borne 
the heat and burden of the day should come 
by night and carry away the prize. The 
Greeks were more fortunate than the rest, 
for their part of the wreck included the 
pilot-house. This they, wading and swim- 
ming beyond the surf or tugging from the 
shore, towed into a little cove between two 
points of weather-beaten cliffs and landed 
it upon the beach. In the pilot-house they 



THE CITY OF LUXURY 163 

camped for the night; but for the others, 
they must work while the moonlight lasted 
and afterwards keep vigil until sunrise. A 
deal of labor this for a pile of firewood ; 
hard labor indeed for the simplest necessity 
of life. 

Later in the season, within half a mile 
of the place where the wreck was brought 
to the shore, I witnessed another scene — 
a scene of action quite as strenuous but to 
a different purpose. The polo grounds are 
situated on the same point where the ves- 
sel went ashore. The green field lay bright 
in the sunshine, while beyond rolled the 
ocean, blue as the sky above it. About the 
side-lines great ladies and gentlemen of 
fashion were gathered to enjoy the game. 
Some sat in finely upholstered carriages, 
drawn by magnificent horses, whose golden 
harness-trappings glittered in the sunshine ; 
others sat in automobiles; while others, 
clinging to the tradition of an earlier day, 
were there on horseback. On the piazza 



1 64 THE CITY OF LUXURY 

of the clubhouse finely gowned women 
and well-groomed men drank tea while 
they watched swift-footed ponies, bearing 
their crimson and yellow-clad riders, hel- 
ter-skelter over the field. As for the game, 
it was a splendid show ; they played well, 
those husky young fellows, with a skill and 
courage altogether admirable, giving the 
lie to the notion that wealth and dissipation 
necessarily go hand-in-hand. 

As I watched the game, admiring the 
skill of the players and realizing the mag- 
nificent surroundings in which they spend 
their lives, — surroundings permitting in- 
finite leisure for the cultivation of body and 
mind, — the words quoted by Matthew 
Arnold, in his beautiful apostrophe to Ox- 
ford, came to my mind. " There are our 
young Barbarians all at play." Arnold, it 
will be remembered, referred to the upper, 
middle, and lower classes of society as Bar- 
barians, Philistines, and Populace. The 
aristocrats, he said, inherited from the 



THE CITY OF LUXURY 165 

Barbarian nobles, their early ancestors, that 
individualism, that passion for doing as one 
likes, which was so marked a characteris- 
tic. From the Barbarians, moreover, came 
their love of field sports, the care of the 
body, manly vigor, good looks, and fine 
complexions. "The chivalry of the Bar- 
barians, with its characteristics of high 
spirit, choice manners, and distinguished 
bearing, — what is this/' he asks, " but the 
commencement of the politeness of our 
aristocratic class ?" " There are our young 
Barbarians all at play." That line of Ar- 
nold's coming to my mind, which at the 
moment was contrasting the scenes I have 
described, suggested the thought that, de- 
spite the familiar words in the Declaration 
of Independence, and our inherited repug- 
nance to the idea, we have an upper, mid- 
dle, and lower class in America. 

We cannot refer to our aristocracy by 
the term Barbarians, for its members are 
not descended from "some victor in a 



1 66 THE CITY OF LUXURY 

Border brawl/' their ancestors being of the 
old-world populace. Yet by whatever name 
it may be called, our aristocracy of wealth 
possesses characteristics curiously akin to 
the descendants of the Goths and Huns. 

America has been a surprisingly short 
time in creating this aristocracy in all its 
refinement. We need not now be ashamed 
to entertain the most beribboned prince in 
our summer palaces at Newport ; and yet, 
but little over fifty years ago, the author 
of "Lotus-Eating " complained mightily 
of the lack of refinement in the " Society " 
of that famous watering-place. "A very 
little time will reveal its characteristic to 
be exaggeration. The intensity which is 
the natural attribute of a new race, and 
which finds in active business its due direc- 
tion and achieves there its truest present 
success, becomes ludicrous in the social 
sphere, because it has no taste and no sense 
of propriety/' He complained that the 
aristocracy, being most successful in the 



THE CITY OF LUXURY 167 

acquisition of wealth, knew but poorly 
how to spend it ; that Croesus, having made 
his money, was bent on throwing it away, 
so he built his house just like his neigh- 
bors' — only a little bigger — and furnished 
it with Louis Quinze or Louis Quatorze 
deformities, just like his neighbors, and 
bought carriages and gave dinners and wore 
splendid clothes, but owned few books or 
pictures; he was mastered by his means, 
and any other man with a large rent-roll 
was always respectable and awful to him. 
" What is high society/' asks the Lotus- 
Eater, "but the genial intercourse of the 
highest intelligence with which we con- 
verse ? It is the festival of Wit and Beauty 
and Wisdom. ... Its hall of reunion, 
whether Holland House, or Charles Lamb's 
parlor, or Schiller's garret, or the Tuileries, 
is a palace of pleasure. Wine and flowers and 
all successes of Art, delicate dresses stud- 
ded with gems, the graceful motion to pas- 
sionate and festal music, are its ornaments 



168 THE CITY OF LUXURY 

and Arabesque outlines. It is a tournament 
wherein the force of the hero is refined 
into the grace of the gentleman — a masque, 
in which womanly sentiment blends with 
manly thought. This is the noble idea of 
society, a harmonious play of the purest 
powers." And in Newport he finds but the 
form of it — the promise that the ideal 
may some day be realized ; but for the time 
we must be content with the exaggeration, 
for " Fine Society is a fruit that ripens 
slowly." 

A generation only has passed since the 
Lotus-Eater wrote his charming book, and 
making allowances for an exaggeration of 
style quite in keeping with the exaggera- 
tion of the fashionable folk about whom 
he wrote, we may say that his dream of 
what American society should be is, in a 
measure, a reality. Here in Newport is 
seen not only the form of a " Fine Society," 
but something of the substance. To be sure, 
much of exaggeration remains, but it is 



THE CITY OF LUXURY 169 

hardly fair to call it characteristic ; it re- 
mains in the excesses of the ultra-fashion- 
able set — the very new aristocracy; but 
back of this excess, the description of which 
furnishes many fair readers with so much 
enjoyment in the Sunday papers, there is a 
solid foundation of good manners, bred of 
culture, in which we may find that "har- 
monious play of the purest powers " the 
Lotus-Eater longed to see. 

This aristocracy, founded on money 
though it be, early learned that money is 
but a means, that culture is the end, and 
it soon came about that a man must be a 
pretty insignificant sort of a millionaire, 
who by his benefactions was unable to 
found a university, or at least have a profes- 
sorship named for him, even if he himself 
were unable to write English grammatically 
— and the children of these millionaires 
benefited by their father's aspirations. We 
may not say by what marvelous means the 
transformation was effected, but certain it 



170 THE CITY OF LUXURY 

is, the Newport of to-day is very different 
from the Newport of a generation ago. 
Croesus does not build his house just like 
his neighbors', only a little bigger, but com- 
mands the services of the ablest architects, 
who have transformed Newport from a city 
of commonplace cottages to one of rare 
architectural distinction. If Croesus lacks 
the taste to furnish his house becomingly, 
he has the sense to hire a decorator to do 
it for him — although in a larger measure 
than we realize, this is unnecessary; for 
Croesus has, in these later days, abandoned 
fast horses and flashy waistcoats, and has 
learned to buy pictures and books for him- 
self — and he enjoys them, too, which is 
even a greater matter. He does not always 
spend his money wisely — that were ask- 
ing too much in a single generation; he 
still makes too great a show of his money, 
leading humble folk to imagine that there 
is some magic pleasure in the mere pos- 
session of vast wealth. He will overdo 



THE CITY OF LUXURY 171 

things occasionally — or at least Mrs. Croe- 
sus will ; as when once she built a tempo- 
rary ballroom next to her stately summer 
home, at a cost — so the newspapers said 
— of some forty thousand dollars, and tore 
it down after a single evening's entertain- 
ment. Mrs. Croesus will spend vast sums 
of money to no rational purpose, and so 
give the Socialists a deal to talk about, be- 
side creating the impression that her hus- 
band's wealth was not inherited ; but on the 
whole she has made tremendous progress 
since she was a schoolgirl. 

Yes, despite all that we like to think to 
the contrary, we have an upper, middle, 
and lower class in America, but these classes 
are quite different from the very distinct 
strata observable in Europe. If Arnold had 
been describing American society, it would 
have been difficult for him to find a nomen- 
clature so readily as he did when he de- 
scribed the English. To a degree the metric 
system has been adopted in the division of 



172 THE CITY OF LUXURY 

Americans into classes — very much de- 
pends on the number of ciphers to the left 
of the decimal point. This is not to say that 
everywhere in America a man is rated by 
the amount of his securities — that were 
an absurd statement so long as the golden 
dome reflects the sunlight over Beacon Hill ; 
but from the very nature of things in a na- 
tion whose history is essentially one of com- 
mercial development, any line between class 
and class must be relative to the success of 
individuals in competing for the reward of 
commercial supremacy; and this reward in 
the first instance is a matter of dollars. 

The history of society in America is the 
story of workingmen rising to be employers 
of labor, and this rise is accompanied with 
a constantly changing standard of living ; 
children whose fathers were content with 
rag-carpets buy, without knowledge of 
their significance, oriental rugs, and wear 
diamond shirt-studs. Their daughters go to 
finishing school and take on a fine surface 



THE CITY OF LUXURY 173 

polishing, their granddaughters go to col- 
lege and learn that the color and design 
of the ancestral rug is what constitutes its 
distinction, not the great price which their 
successful forebears paid for it. This is how 
classes have grown in America, despite 
our faith in the gospel according to Jeffer- 
son; and it is just this process which has 
made Newport to-day so very different 
from the Newport George William Curtis 
wrote about. 

I recently read a novel written twenty- 
five years ago, describing the humiliations 
of a Western girl, whose father was a 
wealthy ranchman, when introduced to the 
polite society of New York. At table she 
never knew which fork to use, and once she 
picked geranium leaves out of the finger- 
bowl and pinned them to her gown. In 
the end, of course, she learned the usages 
of good society — and married a titled 
Englishman. The villain was a Western 
Congressman, who chewed tobacco, and 



174 THE CITY OF LUXURY 

shocked but fascinated the ladies of the 
exclusive set. This antithesis between the 
social development of the West and the 
East was a constant quarry for the novel- 
writer in the last generation, and even now 
stories of this kind are to be found on the 
bookstands. The moral usually is that real 
virtue is not a matter of manners — and all 
good Americans are pretty much alike 
under the skin. Such stories illustrate the 
fact that social classes in America are more 
elastic than in the old world, the one merg- 
ing imperceptibly into the other as indi- 
viduals rise in successful competition. In 
England a junk-dealer's clerk is certain to 
remain a clerk until the end of his days; 
or if, by force of ability, he should become 
a junk-dealer, he will not change his social 
position by a hair's breadth. In America, 
if he has persistency, he is more than likely 
to be the proprietor of a business; and if 
his success be great enough, you may see 
him occupying a box at the Newport horse- 



THE CITY OF LUXURY 175 

show, or hear of his wife's brilliant enter- 
tainments at her villa. You may not read 
that Mrs. Blank was among the guests, — 
it was her grandfather who dealt in scrap- 
iron, and naturally she is a bit exclusive, 
— but our junk-dealer has established 
himself as the ancestor of some future 
exclusive Mrs. Blank. 

There is a danger in generalization, and 
we must not infer that there is no part of 
our American society claiming refinement 
as its heritage, that refinement which is 
inseparable from true nobility and finds 
its best expression in simplicity of life and 
character. Such society we may find en- 
throned in the finest of the palaces which 
front the sea at Newport; we will find it, 
too, in some humble home yonder in the 
City of the Dinner-Pail. Wealth offers no 
barrier to this society any more than pov- 
erty is its open sesame. To the happy 
mortals who dwell therein, money is but 
the means to make the world a happier 



176 THE CITY OF LUXURY 

place in which mankind shall live. This 
man owns a great house which overlooks 
the sea, beautiful pictures hang upon its 
walls, and in the library are fine books and 
precious manuscripts. It has been his 
pleasure to collect these masterpieces of lit- 
erature and art ; he shares the joy of them 
with his friends, he invites the student and 
the connoisseur to enjoy his treasures with 
him; he lends his pictures to the public 
galleries and holds his manuscripts in trust 
for scholars ; and so his pleasure has added 
to the public wealth as surely as the rail- 
roads his industry has built or the mines he 
has opened. And after the long day's work 
in one of the countless factories which 
the genius of this multi-millionaire has 
created, many men and women return to 
their quiet homes, there to enjoy the same 
pictures and books which enrich his man- 
sion — for in this marvelous age, machin- 
ery, so despised by some, has given to the 
humblest citizen every means of culture. 



THE CITY OF LUXURY 177 

One day during my summer on the sea- 
girt farm, society was stirred by the arri- 
val of a duchess who came for a visit to a 
great house on the avenue. The next after- 
noon many carriages stopped at the door, 
the footmen leaving cards ; society paid its 
call of welcome. Driving my quiet rig by 
the house, the sound of the horse's feet 
upon the pavement attracted attention 
within. The great doors swung open ; two 
flunkeys, dressed in crimson satin livery, 
white silk stockings, golden knee-buckles, 
and powdered wigs, stood before me ; one 
extended a golden salver to receive my cards, 
but, seeing his mistake, retired. Before the 
doors closed behind him, I glanced into 
the great hall, down which a line of other 
flunkeys in similar livery stood at attention. 
Somehow that livery has remained in my 
memory ever since. Surely, in the fifty years 
since Mrs. Potiphar consulted the Reverend 
Mr. Cream Cheese concerning the color 
and cut of the Potiphar livery, Americans 



178 THE CITY OF LUXURY 

have made tremendous strides in dressing 
their servants. It is not, however, the ques- 
tionable right of Americans to the apos- 
tolic succession of flunkeydom that keeps 
the vision of those radiant servants in my 
memory, but the suggestion of luxury 
their decorous forms called up to a mind 
filled, that afternoon, with the problems of 
poverty, and with speculations concerning 
the possibilities of a distribution of wealth 
in which a living wage might be guaran- 
teed to every able-bodied man who is will- 
ing to work for it. 

Poverty and Luxury — these are the dis- 
eases of our industrial regime, to the cure 
of which the Socialists offer their ineffec- 
tual remedy; ineffectual since the popula- 
tion of the United States is made up of 
ninety million individuals, some of whom 
will be forever on the verge of bank- 
ruptcy, however great their income, and 
some frugal and always carrying their ac- 
count on the right side of the balance 



THE CITY OF LUXURY 179 

sheet, however small their annual allot- 
ment of wealth. 

Poverty and Luxury — twin diseases 
sapping the life of society : the one destroy- 
ing ambition by withholding sufficient 
nourishment to the body; the other ren- 
dering men worthless by a superabundance 
of the good things of life. Poverty is a 
disease not indigenous to our American 
soil ; it is a plague brought in by immi- 
grant ships from worn-out Europe, and 
the patients are cured here by the thou- 
sands. So long as there remains an uncul- 
tivated acre of land anywhere in the Union, 
there is no real cause of poverty, nor any 
excuse for luxury while a foot of land is 
undeveloped. 

"The extreme of luxury," De Lavelaye 
says, " is that which destroys the product 
of many days' labor without bringing any 
rational satisfaction to the owner." Another 
author calls luxury "that which creates 
imaginary needs, exaggerates real wants, 



180 THE CITY OF LUXURY 

diverts them from their true end, estab- 
lishes a habit of prodigality in society, and 
offers through the senses a satisfaction of 
self-love which puffs up, but does not nour- 
ish the heart, and which presents to others 
the picture of a happiness to which they 
can never attain." 

Take either definition you will, we 
behold in the social life at Newport a 
measure of luxury men have not wit- 
nessed since the fall of Rome. 

There was a time when economists 
apologized for luxury on the ground that 
those who supported it kept money in cir- 
culation, thus benefiting the poor ; but that 
was when scholars believed that money was 
wealth in itself, and fondly believed that 
one might eat his cake and have it too. 
" Money changes hands/' they said, "and 
in this circulation the life of business and 
commerce consists. When money is spent, 
it is all one to the public who spends it." 
We have passed beyond such specious ar- 



THE CITY OF LUXURY 181 

guments, but there are those even now who 
think if a man builds a temporary ballroom 
and destroys it the next day, some one has 
been benefited. The workers engaged in 
building and demolishing it and the men 
who employed them have, no doubt, ob- 
tained an immediate benefit; yet the same 
money might have built ten houses to be 
the homes of generations of men. Mrs. 
Croesus has had her vanishing palace, but 
ten families are sleeping without shelter 
because of it. She should beg her husband 
to use his influence at Washington to re- 
strict immigration, or else to employ his 
wealth in such a way that these newcom- 
ers may be allowed to earn a proper living. 
The sentiments which give rise to lux- 
ury, we are told, are vanity, sensuality, and 
the instinct of adornment ; but the greatest 
of these is vanity, the desire to distinguish 
one's self and to appear of more import- 
ance than others. It is this aspect of lux- 
ury that flaunts itself on the avenue during 



1 82 THE CITY OF LUXURY 

the season. " My owner is rich, rich, rich," 
toots the horn of yonder marvelously 
upholstered motor-car, as it speeds along 
regardless of the pedestrian exercising his 
inalienable right to cross the street. " My 
husband is a multi-millionaire," this splen- 
didly gowned matron declares, trailing her 
marvelously wrought skirt in the mud as 
she steps from her carriage, while her foot- 
man, in a livery more splendid than that 
of any prince in Europe, stares vacantly 
into space and touches his shining hat. 
Yes, these people are distinguished, but it 
would take an exceptionally sharp eye to 
tell which in this hierarchy of ostentation 
is of the most importance. 

Condemnation of luxury, however, is 
not condemnation of wealth. Luxury is a 
disease merely, which may attack the suc- 
cessful individual just as poverty may sink 
the unsuccessful one to lower and lower 
depths of despair ; and is no more a neces- 
sary result of a large income than poverty 



THE CITY OF LUXURY 183 

is of a small one. The question, after all, 
is not, how great is this man's fortune, but 
what does he do with it ? We can make 
no quarrel with the Captain of Industry 
because he possesses so many dollars that 
neither he nor a dozen clerks could count 
them in a twelvemonth, if he has earned 
those dollars by his skill in trade and is con- 
scious of his stewardship. He entered the 
race on even terms with many thousand 
others, and outstripped them ; by the very 
bent of his genius he is incapable of be- 
coming a prey to luxury, and uses his 
wealth to develop new railroads and open 
new mines, and thus feeds with a bounti- 
ful hand thousands of half-starved immi- 
grants from the old world. Such a man is 
a benefactor of mankind, as truly as the 
greatest philanthropist. He is engaged in 
a real service to the nation, and his great 
fortune is the witness of his service. It has 
become the fashion of late to belittle these 
men of great genius and to forget the bene- 



1 84 THE CITY OF LUXURY 

fits which they have bestowed; but this 
fashion will soon pass and men will again 
restore to them the praise which is their 
due. 

When, in the economic history of man, 
the world passed from the agricultural, 
through the handicraft, to the industrial 
stage, the multi-millionaire became inevit- 
able ; when the first factory was built, the 
"trust" was its certain result. The trust 
and the multi-millionaire are essential fac- 
tors in our industrial evolution, stepping- 
stones to a new and better order. Very 
well, you say, we will accept the multi- 
millionaire at his real value ; he is indeed 
a necessary factor in the development of 
our industrial world, and we will not only 
cease to pursue him with venomous preju- 
dice, but we will weigh carefully the find- 
ings of investigating committees and allow 
the rich every privilege guaranteed to the 
humblest citizen by the Constitution. We 
will do even more than this : we will admit 



THE CITY OF LUXURY 185 

the right of the multi-millionaire to the 
fruit of his industry, and allow him to keep 
unmolested his numerous residences, his 
horses, his motor-cars and his steam yachts. 
But what right has his son, who never 
earned a dollar throughout all his useless 
days, to inherit this vast wealth ? Well, that 
is a matter for future philosophers and 
future statesmen to settle among themselves. 
When the evil becomes sufficiently acute, 
they will, no doubt, find some remedy, but 
for the present we have more immediate 
problems. 

We do not know toward what end our 
American Republic is moving, whether it 
be toward that industrial state which one 
enthusiastic young Socialist has prophesied 
will be a reality within ten years, or 
whether it be in quite a different direction. 
But those who mark the course of events 
see a mighty evolution at work in our 
national life. On one side we behold the 
flood of immigration typified by the Greek 



1 86 THE CITY OF LUXURY 

fisher-folk and Portuguese farm-hands, 
working throughout the long night on 
Brenton's Point, to win from the sea a 
scanty pile of firewood ; and on the other, 
the lords of wealth, living in regal splen- 
dor in the stately homes overlooking the 
sea. The amazing natural resources of the 
new world have brought hither these hum- 
ble folk to a richer life than their fathers 
ever dreamed might be, and the same nat- 
ural resources have made possible this life 
of splendor — more vast if not more mag- 
nificent than the world has known before. 
What this evolution means, we shall none 
of us live to understand ; for the American 
nation is still in its infancy, its natural 
resources are still undeveloped, and its 
contribution to civilization still lies in the 
future. 



@6e tfilier^ibe ptz& 

CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS 
U . S . A 



7 1909 



